As the keynote speaker at a recent conference of the International Consortium on Government Financial Management held in Washington DC, I had the opportunity to discuss with representatives from over 40 countries one of the primary challenges facing governments around the world – citizen engagement.

The GCFP invites guest blog submissions to encourage discussion of important financial policy issues. This first guest posting, by Bob Pozen, proposes a “Third Type of Retirement Plan” that would address some of the stresses in public sector defined benefit pension plans while preserving much of the...

Greece recently failed to pay $1.7 billion due to the IMF, thereby becoming the first developed country to default on an IMF loan. That missed payment represents only a portion of the approximately $23 billion in IMF credit outstanding to Greece, suggesting the ultimate losses to the Fund could be m...

It is the rare journalist who tackles the topic of government credit programs and their ills. Rarer still is a popular account that accurately brings these complicated issues to life. Kudos to Michael Grunwald, who writing for Politico, did just that. I highly recommend his article. (Note that to ge...

Last week Bob Pozen, a Visiting Senior Lecturer here at MIT Sloan with a distinguished background in government, business and education gave an eye-opening lunch talk. The topic was “Other Post-Employment Benefits” or OPEBs—which is accounting jargon for the liabilities governments incur for retiree...

What will people say 1,000 years from now when they look back at the conventional wisdom about financial policy today? Peter Fisher of the Tuck School at Dartmouth College reflected on that question in his keynote speech at the Inaugural Conference on Finance and Policy held at MIT Sloan on Septembe...

In a new paper, How Much Can Collective Defined Contribution Plans Improve Risk-Sharing?, GCFP Director [...]

by Ricardo J. Caballero and Alp Simsek

by Khalid Alsweilem, Mark Kritzman, and Malan Rietveld | Sovereign Wealth Funds

by Laura E. Kodres, Leslie Sheng Shen, and Darrell Duffie | The need for US dollar funding during the financial stresses in mid-March 2020, as the COVID pandemic news shocked markets, was evident in a number of countries.