Bio
Sebastian Mallaby
Sebastian Mallaby is director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a columnist and former editorial board member at the Washington Post and author of More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.
John Paulson
John Alfred Paulson (born December 14, 1955) is the founder and president of Paulson & Co., a New York-based hedge fund.
Robert E. Rubin
Robert Rubin is co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and a counselor at Centerview Partners. From 1999 to 2009, Rubin served as a member of the board of directors and senior advisor at Citigroup.
In 2005, he was one of the founders of The Hamilton Project, an economic policy project housed at the Brookings Institution. In 1995, Rubin was appointed as the 70th secretary of the treasury. Rubin joined the Clinton administration in 1993 as assistant to the president for economic policy and as director of the newly created National Economic Council.
Rubin is the author of the best-selling book In An Uncertain World. He is a member of the Harvard Corporation, on the board of trustees of Mount Sinai Medical Center, and chairman of the board of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which is the nation's leading community development support organization with 38 offices nationwide.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- fiscal policy
Measures employed by governments to stabilize the economy, specifically by adjusting the levels and allocations of taxes and government expenditures. When the economy is sluggish, the government may cut taxes, leaving taxpayers with extra cash to spend and thereby increasing levels of consumption. An increase in public-works spending may likewise pump cash into the economy, having an expansionary effect. Conversely, a decrease in government spending or an increase in taxes tends to cause the economy to contract. Fiscal policy is often used in tandem with monetary policy. Until the 1930s, fiscal policy aimed at maintaining a balanced budget; since then it has been used “countercyclically,” as recommended by John Maynard Keynes, to offset the cycle of expansion and contraction in the economy. Fiscal policy is more effective at stimulating a flagging economy than at cooling an inflationary one, partly because spending cuts and tax increases are unpopular and partly because of the work of economic stabilizers. See also business cycle.
- fiscal policy on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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