Brookings Establishes Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy; David Wessel to Direct

Today, Brookings announces the establishment of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, which will focus on the important roles of and interplay between fiscal and monetary policy and will bring together the best new evidence and analysis from the research community with the informed, practical perspectives of the business community and policymakers. David Wessel, Wall Street Journal columnist and New York Times best-selling author, will serve as the center’s founding director.

The center’s creation has been made possible by the generous support of Glenn Hutchins, vice chairman of the Brookings Board of Trustees, whose $10 million grant from The Hutchins Family Foundation will underwrite the center’s operational activities during its first five years as well as provide ongoing endowment support. Hutchins, co-founder of Silver Lake, a global technology investment firm, is also a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and recently endowed the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, his alma mater. He is also serving as chair of Brookings’s Second Century Campaign, in celebration of the institution’s upcoming 100th anniversary.

Hutchins said about the new center that,

We hope to create a center of excellence which will foster world-class research and analysis of monetary and fiscal policy—as well as of the interaction between the two. The next decade of economic policy-making will be dominated by these questions and our goal is for the Center to be at the heart of the discussion. I can think of no one better equipped to lead this effort than David Wessel.

Watch Hutchins discuss the new center and Wessel on CNBC

In January, Hutchins participated in an event, “Fostering Growth through Innovation,” during which he said that, while the economy was starting to recover in many ways to pre-recession levels, “the big problem is the political failure in this town associated with the inability to solve our government debt problems.” Watch a clip from the event below:

He also moderated a recent panel discussion about the new documentary “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of the Hutchins Center at Harvard.

The new Brookings center will be housed within the Economic Studies program, and Wessel will join Brookings as a senior fellow.

Get more information about the center and read the press release. 

Read what the Wall Street Journal had to say about the new center.