The William S. Beinecke Lecture featuring Martín Guzmán

The Covid-19 pandemic, which coincided with a quantitative loosening and lowering of interest rates, led to public debt piling up across the globe, but especially in the Global South. The war in Ukraine only compounded the problem, as interest rates rose, further increasing borrowing countries’ vulnerability to default. As the dollar appreciates in value, countries across the globe face looming external debt crises, which reinforces the uneven power dynamics of the international system. Martin Guzman has firsthand knowledge of such crises. From 2019 to 2022, he served as Argentina’s Minister of Economy, where he managed a sovereign debt crisis that included the second largest debt restructuring in history. Guzman will share his thoughts on how countries can manage these crises going forward. He also will address ways to make the global financial system and its regulatory frameworks more fair going forward.

Guzman is the William S. Beinecke Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is also a Professor of Money, Credit, and Banking at the National University of La Plata, Argentina. He is the co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), an academic center at Columbia University Business School, which works to broaden dialogue and explore trade-offs in development policy by bringing the best ideas in development to policymakers and that strives for a more equitably governed world by democratizing the production and use of knowledge. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Globalization and Development and is a member of the editorial board. He holds a PhD in economics from Brown University (2013).

Keynote address followed by fireside chat with Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor