Brad Setser

Brad W. Setser is the Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His expertise includes global trade and capital flows, financial vulnerability analysis and sovereign debt restructuring. He regularly blogs at Follow the Money.

Setser served as a senior adviser to the U.S. trade representative from 2021 to 2022, where he worked on the resolution of a number of trade disputes. He had previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis in the U.S. Treasury from 2011 to 2015, where he worked on Europe’s financial crisis, currency policy, financial sanctions, commodity shocks and Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. He also served as a director for international economics on the staff of the National Economic Council and the National Security Council.

He is the author of “Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power” (CFR, 2008) and the co-author, with Nouriel Roubini, of “Bailouts and Bail-ins: Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies” (Peterson Institute, 2004). His work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Finance and Development, Global Governance and the Georgetown Journal of International Law, among others.

Setser was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2016 to 2020, a fellow from 2007 to 2009, and an international affairs fellow in 2003. He also has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University, a master’s from Sciences Po Paris, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University.