VoxTalks Economics

After Liberation Day, the dollar fell by 6%. We would usually expect tariffs to send exchange rates in the other direction. So what happened?
In another episode recorded at the CEPR Annual Symposium in Paris, Giancarlo Corsetti tells Tim Phillips about new research that shows how exchange rates are responding to US tariffs since 2018. When tariffs are expected and retaliation is swift, he argues, then market reactions reflect a repricing of long-run risk, rather than the text-book response we might expect.

In 2025, the trade story was about tariffs. And that story isn’t over. Does anyone know what happens next? 
Richard Baldwin of IMD Business School and CEPR was author of the chapter on tariffs in the CEPR Press book The Economic Consequences of The Second Trump Administration, and also of The Great Trade Hack, published by CEPR press in 2025. Gene Grossman of Princeton and CEPR analysed the legality of the Trump tariffs in a recent CEPR discussion paper.
So, at the CEPR Symposium in Paris, Tim Phillips asked both of them: What happens next?
Download The Economic Consequences of The Second Trump Administration
Download The Great Trade Hack 
Download Commandeering the Customs (gated link)

Another special episode recorded at the CEPR annual symposium in Paris.
When does the level of debt in the US become a problem for the economy, and for ordinary Americans? And when it does, what are the policy options to fix it?
That’s the topic of a Chapter in the CEPR book. The authors are Ugo Panizza of the Graduate Institute, Geneva and CEPR, and Antonio Fatás of INSEAD and CEPR. They talk to Tim Phillips about how recent policy – notably the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – is blowing up US debt and warn that the administration can’t keep kicking the can down the road for ever.

Stablecoins are digital tokens, pegged to a fiat currency. What could possibly go wrong?
For one type of stablecoin the answer is: plenty, according to Richard Portes. The founder and honorary president of CEPR is also co-chair of the European Systemic Risk Board Crypto Asset Task Force. In this role he has been investigating the risks of multi-issuer stablecoins in Europe. He tells Tim Phillips that, if one of these stablecoins hit trouble, US holders could use European regulation to recover their investment from the coin’s European reserves. And that, he argues, would be a threat to Europe’s financial stability.

In another of our special episodes recorded at the CEPR annual Symposium, we ask: is it time for Europe to rearm?
The message from the US could not be clearer: it is time for European countries to take care of their own security. If Europe decides to rearm, it has the industrial base – but Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute and CEPR warns that it isn’t converting that capacity into credible deterrence. 
Tim Phillips asks him what European rearmament could mean in practice: not just scaling up production but buying smarter and investing in next-generation technologies that can spill over into the wider economy. And is there enough political will to create a European defence architecture that can stand on its own?