monetary-policy
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The bank behind your bank
The Federal Reserve System was built to stop a banking panic. More than a century later, it still wrestles with the same question: how do you move money quickly without moving judgment too fast?
Allison Schrager
Allison Schrager is an economist who turned the study of risk into a full-contact reporting beat - hanging out with brothel madams, big-wave surfers, paparazzi and horse breeders to figure out how the best risk-takers actually decide. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Bloomberg Opinion columnist and City Journal contributing editor, she holds a PhD in economics from Columbia and once helped Nobel laureate Robert Merton design retirement products. Her 2019 book 'An Economist Walks into a Brothel' argued that financial theory belongs everywhere people gamble with their futures; her follow-up, 'Worth the Risk,' is due from Yale University Press in September 2026.
Austan Goolsbee
Austan Goolsbee is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, one of the most closely watched voices on U.S. interest rates and inflation. A longtime University of Chicago Booth economist who chaired Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, he is equally known for empirical research on the internet and taxes and for being the rare central banker who once won Washington's funniest celebrity contest.
John Cochrane
John H. Cochrane is an American economist, the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and author of the field-defining textbook Asset Pricing. A physicist-turned-finance scholar, he champions the fiscal theory of the price level, writes the popular free-market blog and Substack The Grumpy Economist, co-stars on Hoover's GoodFellows broadcast, and flies competition sailplanes in his spare time.
Scott Sumner
Scott Sumner is the economist behind The Money Illusion, the blog that turned an obscure idea - that central banks should target nominal GDP, not just inflation - into a mainstream policy debate. The intellectual force behind market monetarism, he spent 33 years teaching at Bentley before becoming the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair Emeritus of Monetary Policy at George Mason's Mercatus Center. A late bloomer who bought his first cell phone in 2011, he is also a prolific film reviewer who has watched and rated thousands of movies.
Joe Weisenthal
Joe Weisenthal is a Bloomberg executive editor, co-anchor of 'What'd You Miss?' on Bloomberg Television, and co-host of the Odd Lots podcast with Tracy Alloway. Known on Twitter/X as @TheStalwart, he has spent 20+ years making arcane financial topics accessible and engaging for broad audiences. He helped grow Business Insider into a 50-million-visitor destination, then brought that digital-first energy to Bloomberg. His Odd Lots podcast, launched in 2015, is one of the most respected finance podcasts in the world. He is also one-quarter of the band Light Sweet Crude, proving that a man can love yield curves and guitar riffs in equal measure.