The IMF Will Host a Conference on "Rethinking Macro Policy II: First Steps and Early Lessons"

*** Conference will be webcast LIVE here! ***

It has now been five years since the outbreak of the global financial crisis. A central question is how the crisis has changed the way we think about macroeconomic policy. The IMF originally tackled this issue at a 2011 conference, which then spawned a book that was published by the MIT Press. Two years later, the time seems right for another assessment. Research has gone on, policies have been tried, debates have been intense. So, the IMF has decided to come back to the same theme. To do this, it has organized a conference on Rethinking Macro Policy II: First Steps and Early Lessons , which will take place at the IMF s Headquarters in Washington, DC on April 16 17, 2013

The conference will bring together leading academics and policymakers from around the globe, as well as representatives from civil society, the private sector, and the media. It will be hosted by:

• George Akerlof (University of California, Berkeley and IMF)
• Olivier Blanchard (MIT, Economic Counselor and Director of Research at the IMF
• David Romer (University of California, Berkeley)
• Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University)

Attendance is by invitation only, but the proceedings will be webcast live, at this site.

Five years into the crisis, the contours of the macroeconomic policy of the future are only slowly coming into focus. From macroeconomic to financial stability, policy makers have realized that they have to watch many targets. They have also realized that they have potentially many more instruments at their disposal, from macro prudential tools to unconventional monetary policy. But how to map instruments to targets remains very much a work in progress.

--Olivier Blanchard