The Challenge of Stabilizing Federal Debt

Myron Scholes Global Markets Forum

May 2, 2012, 5:30–7 p.m., Gleacher Center

Achieving a sustainable federal budget will require the United States to deviate from the policies of the past several decades in at least one of the following ways: raise federal revenues significantly above their average share of GDP, make major changes to the sorts of benefits provided for Americans when they become older, or substantially reduce the role of the rest of the federal government relative to the size of the economy.

Douglas Elmendorf is the director of the Congressional Budget Office.

This event was part of the Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) and was generously sponsored by Myron Scholes.

Speaker Profiles


Douglas Elmendorf is the eighth director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Before he came to CBO in January 2009, he was a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. As the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar, he served as coeditor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and the director of the Hamilton Project, an initiative to promote broadly shared economic growth.

Elmendorf was previously an assistant professor at Harvard University, a principal analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, and an assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. In those positions, he worked on budget policy, Social Security, Medicare, national health-care reform, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, and other topics.

He earned his PhD and AM in economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, and his AB summa cum laude from Princeton University.