trade-policy
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Rosa Whitaker and the art of thinking in decades
She helped write the rules for U.S.-Africa trade, then built a business around putting them to work. Now Rosa Whitaker is handing on an advocacy role while pursuing the investments, companies and women leaders she wants to outlast her.
The Lobbyists Who Lost the Bill - and Won the Exemption
Public Strategies Washington sells access, judgment and a useful refusal to confuse the first plan with the real objective. Its best case study begins with a defeat in Congress - then moves across town and ends with an exemption worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per client.
Brink Lindsey
Brink Lindsey is a writer and policy thinker who spent decades inside Washington's free-market establishment - vice president for research at the Cato Institute, a leading free-trade voice - before publicly reinventing himself as a 'recovering libertarian.' Now senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, he argues that capable government and robust social insurance are not enemies of markets but their necessary complement. His writing, including The Captured Economy (with Steven Teles) and The Permanent Problem, wrestles with a single paradox: rich countries have never had more material plenty, and people have never felt less satisfied. He explores it weekly from a base in northeastern Thailand on his Substack, The Permanent Problem.
Stan Veuger
Stan Veuger is a Dutch-born economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies political economy and public finance, and who became briefly famous in 2025 for co-authoring the AEI analysis that exposed a factor-of-four error at the heart of the Trump administration's reciprocal tariff formula. A Harvard PhD with a stack of unrelated degrees in Spanish literature, law, and business, he edits AEI Economic Perspectives, teaches at Harvard, and once published peer-reviewed research proving that LeBron James measurably increased the number of restaurants near his arena.
Ryan Petersen
Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, the technology-driven freight forwarding company he built from a Y Combinator batch into an $8 billion global logistics giant. A serial entrepreneur who started importing goods from China at 17, he previously co-founded ImportGenius and has become one of the most influential voices in supply chain and trade policy - most famously by renting a boat to tour the LA port congestion in 2021 and posting a viral Twitter thread that prompted California's governor to call him directly. He is also a venture partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.