Hello and welcome. My name is Sophia Bash and you're listening to the CER podcast.

Hello and welcome to the series on the economics of populism. My name is Christian Odendal. I'm the chief economist at the Center for European Reform.

And today I'm a conversation with

Marty Wolf of the Financial Times and Barry Achengreen from University of Berkeley. The topic of

this episode is a macroeconomic policy or macroeconomic policy failures behind the rise of populism

and what do we need to change in macroeconomics to fight back?

And I would first like to ask you to give your take in roughly 60 seconds on that question, Martin.

Well, I think macroeconomic policy failures, as seen by the public, are clearly part of the rise of populism.

We had an enormous financial crisis in the West between 2007 and 2009. Then this was followed by another wave of crisis in Europe.

These weren't expected. The leaders of both the financial sector and the policy makers monetary

policymakers and others hadn't expected it they didn't warn people that this could

happen though they responded fairly quickly the economies had huge

recessions the subsequent growth of our economies has been far slower than it was before.

The unemployment has fallen back again in quite a number of countries. It's still pretty high in many.

And living standards have been nearly stagnant even in countries which have been quite successful.

This combination of events has clearly made a lot of people very unhappy, made them very anxious

and made them lose confidence in the wisdom and probity of the people in charge.

Great.

Would that be your take as well?

The way I would put it is that the global financial crisis and the euro crisis have been central factors contributing

to the populist backlash.

Do the global financial crisis and the euro crisis, as they played out, reflect the failures

...