Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson explains the national debt—where it came from and what it means to you and to future generations. In White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You he and co-author James Kwak argue that if we persist on our current course, the national debt will reduce the number of jobs, lower living standards, increase inequality, and force a reduction in government services.

Economists Simon Johnson and James Kwak discuss their article “Debt and Dumb,” in the November issue of Vanity Fair. They argue that today’s Tea Party is a betrayal of the foundation of American fiscal policy as established by Alexander Hamilton and has nothing in common with the Boston uprising it claims to honor. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, believed that good credit, based on the power to tax, is essential to a nation’s security.

Nicole Gelinas, contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street and Washington, and Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and co-founder of the blog The Baseline Scenario, discuss some of the big economic stories in today's news. The Fed's program known as QE2 is coming to an end -- did it work? Bank of America is planning to pay $14 billion back to investors who lost money on mortgage deals gone bad -- is it enough? And what's going on in Greece, exactly?

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The hunt is on for a new head of the International Monetary Fund as the organization still tries to manage both global economic troubles and sovereign debt crises. On today’s first Backstory segment, we’ll take a look at the history of the IMF, criticisms of it, and its difficult tasks in today’s economic climate. We’ll be joined by Simon Johnson, Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT and former Chief Economist for the IMF.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, talks about why Standard & Poor's downgraded the outlook for U.S. debt to "negative" and how that factors into the ongoing battle over the national debt. Washington Post Economic Policy Reporter reporter Lori Montgomery joins the conversation to talk about how the S&P rating might change the political landscape of debt in Washington.

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The world leaders of the G20 are meeting later this week, and there are a lot of ideas afloat on how to reorganize world currency (gold standard, anyone?). Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, helps us examine the notion that the U.S. dollar may not remain at the top of the heap forever.

Stock markets around the world seemed jittery yesterday: The Dow Jones industrials dropped briefly below 10,000 before making up most of their loss. Since a recent high in April, the Dow has dropped nearly 12 percent. What does this number indicate about our economy? Is the market the end-all-be-all measurement of how our economy is doing?