I'm just delighted to have Anders Åslund on Economics Matters -- the Podcast. I met Anders in the late 1990s when he asked me to go with him to Russia to discuss pension and other economic reforms with the Russian government. At the time, Anders was working for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is now Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
This was a period of great hope for Russia, making it the first of many fascinating consulting and research (with the Gaidar Institute) trips to Russia. But the best part of returning to Russia (which my great grandfather had escaped on a stolen horse!) was meeting Anders, who is both a marvelous economist and extremely well informed about the global economy and geopolitics. Please listen to/watch this podcast to learn Anders assessment of the future of Ukraine, what's driving President Trump's policy, and his scary assessment of the world economy.
Ander's Wiki Bio in Brief:
Anders Åslund is a Swedish economist and former Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is also a chairman of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE). His work focuses on economic transition from centrally planned to market economies. Åslund served as an economic adviser to the governments of Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Ukraine and from 2003 was director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Åslund was an advocate of early, comprehensive, and radical economic reforms in Russia and Eastern Europe.[1] He worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from 2006 to 2015. In 2013, neoconservative David Frum wrote that "Anders Aslund at the Peterson Institute is one of the world’s leading experts on the collapse of the planned Soviet economy."[2] From 2010 to 2013 and again in 2022 he contributed to The Moscow Times, an independent English-language newspaper; he is also a long-time contributor to the Kyiv Post.
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