The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, in partnership with the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, announced today the expansion of its Economic Diplomacy Initiative (EDI).

While there’s plenty of disagreement about how the money should be used, almost everyone involved in public-policy debates agrees that it would be good if the federal government could collect more revenue without raising tax rates or reducing tax deductions or credits.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has made her proposed 2 percent wealth tax on those worth more than $50 million a central part of her presidential campaign. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two economists at the University of California at Berkeley, who helped developed the proposal, estimated that it it would rake in $187 billion a year.

Lawrence Summers, a former student of the late Martin Feldstein, says farewell to his old mentor.

The Federal Reserve will over the next several months make monetary policy decisions that are as consequential as any it has made since the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007-2008. The temptation in a highly uncertain and politicized environment will be to move cautiously. Yet this would be a grave error in the current context, where a recession could be catastrophic and the odds of one beginning in the next year, while still less than 50-50, now appear significant and increasing.

Senator Marco Rubio, R-Florida, has recently claimed that the worrying decline of private investment in the American economy can be attributed to "shareholder capitalism" and "short-termism". In this co-authored op-ed, economic specialists Lawrence H. Summers and Anna Stansbury share their thoughts on whether and why this is the case.