The Hale Report

A podcast on the implications of blockchain with Sheila Warren, head of Data, Blockchain, and Digital Assets at the World Economic Forum. Sheila's background as a Wall Street lawyer has served her well in Silicon Valley; she approaches the subject of cryptocurrencies and blockchain with clarity and objectivity. Some quick takes: crypto is not going away, and we are just discovering how it can be used to increase inclusivity, economic equality, and innovation. She envisions a future in which today's money coexists with central bank digital currencies and cryptocurrencies to serve a broad range of financial needs.

Our guest is the eminent economist Paul Sheard, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center, an expert in both monetary policy and the Japanese economy. Dr Sheard explains how innovations originally conceived at the Bank of Japan decades ago including quantitative easing have been used to combat recent financial crises. He recommends structural changes that could ostensibly affect the independence of central banks, since in practice a merger of fiscal and monetary policy has already begun in earnest. He also weighs in on fintech and innovations that began not on Wall Street or Washington, but in Silicon Valley, imagining changes in the financial ecosystem in the decades to come.

EconVue Editor-in-Chief, Lyric Hughes Hale today speaks with Karen Petrou, co-founder of Federal Financial Analytics in Washington, DC, and the subject is inequality. Miss Petrou is widely thought of as one of the brightest minds in Washington. Her research focuses on economic policy, especially in regard to banking regulation. If you don't know her work yet, check out her new book, "Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America."

Joined by Dr. William Overholt, who is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Business, Lyric and Dr. Overholt talked about US-China relations.

In this episode of the Hale Report, editor Lyric Hughes Hale interviews Robert J Gordon, Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. He discusses how Covid has impacted the US economy, and what we can expect as the pandemic recedes. Will productivity improve as a result of shifts in employment, or will it remain flat, as it has for decades in spite of technological improvements?

Welcome to the Hale Report at EconVue’s studio in Chicago. Today is Friday, March 13th 2020 and we will be having a conversation with two renowned experts in their fields. Ezra Vogel is professor emeritus at Harvard University, a scholar of both Japan and China, and Noriyuki Shikata is a career diplomat who has served at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. He is conducting research at Harvard this year, so both of our guests are joining us from Cambridge. Mr Shikata has also studied under Professor Vogel, so they have known each other for quite some time. We will be posting their bios on our website, Econvue.com as well as links to Prof. Vogel’s latest book about the history of the relationship between China and Japan, Facing History-very relevant right now. Both Professor Vogel and Ambassador Shikata had been scheduled to be in Chicago tonight, to address the 90th anniversary Gala of the Japan America Society of Chicago. Circumstances that are well known to all intervened, and although the Gala will be rescheduled for later in the year, we thought this would be a good time to go virtual and discuss the importance of the friendship between our two countries.

Today's guest is a fellow Chicagoan, best-selling author Michele Wucker. Her thought-provoking book, the Gray Rhino, was published in 2016 by St Martin’s Press. Michele’s key insight is that even when we see the future charging at us, we often fail to act.

Our guest is a longtime friend and expert contributor to EconVue, David W. Johnson. He is CEO of 4sight Health and author of a new book, The Customer Revolution in Healthcare just published by McGraw Hill. He discusses how aligning economic incentives with patient needs will deliver better outcomes at lower costs with superior customer service. The market will be won by disruptive, bottom-up, and customer-centric, tech-saavy competitors who will deliver kinder, smarter, and cheaper health care. This is a subject absolutely everyone has a stake in, and Johnson explains in his interview not just what is broken, but how it can be fixed.

The Hale Report interviews Kathryn Ibata-Arens, Vincent de Paul Professor of Political Science & Director of the Global Asian Studies Program at DePaul University. Her new book, Beyond Technonationalism, Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia is published by Stanford University Press. An expert in Japan, she spent six years researching entrepreneurship in four countries, Japan, China, India and Singapore. Among her conclusions, just the right amount of protection and openness, combined with size and distance to internal and external markets, leads to the successful competition in biomedical markets. She calls this theory of state Networked Technonationalism or NTN. By contrast, the United States has been the greatest proponent of technoglobalism, fully open borders but now something has changed. In a stunning reversal of trends, China is now defending its use of technologies developed elsewhere in the world as belonging to humanity, and the US is fighting hard to protect its technologies. Perhaps this is important to maintaining its pole position. Ibata-Arens uses a non-Asian metaphor to describe the optimal mix of openness and protection. Janus is the Roman god of beginnings, openings, and doors. Open to the outside, closed and protective to the inside, the Temple of Janus was open only during times of war. Likewise, Asian countries seeing to improve their innovative and entrepreneurial potential have been compelled to open to the outside world, despite the risks to the domestic economy… This dilemma—open and exposed or closed and left behind—presents a challenge to national governments and is the central problematique of this book.

EconVue Editor-in-Chief Lyric Hughes Hale interviews Nikolai Tagarov, advisor to the European Commission, about the recent travails in Venezuela. They discuss how the drop in oil prices has been replaced by income from drug trafficking, and how this has led to immigration flows that threaten not just the southern border of the United States, but all of Central America. Tagarov explains how Venezuela became one of the greatest failures in economic history and a contributor to human misery. He calls for a reexamination of the Monroe Doctrine, which allowed the US to intervene in its own neighborhood to protect its vital interests. Bigger picture, Tagarov envisions a new regionally-based multipolarity, replacing the previous unipolarity of the US.