Experts in the News | Miller Center

Banking system in crisis: The Fed and popular governance

Financial crises shape societies, overturn governments, and alter the course of history. Simply put, crisis is the one constant of capitalist economies. Out of the ashes of the Panic of 1907—the first worldwide financial crisis of the twentieth century—Congress sought to moderate financial storms by creating the Federal Reserve in 1913. Drawing on lessons from history and modern monetary policy, a panel of experts considers the emergence of the Federal Reserve and its role in fighting the societal tumult that flows from financial instability, highlighting the staggering power of "the Fed" and its place in a democratic society.

Robert Bruner

Banking system in crisis: The Fed and popular governance

Scott Miller

What the Founding Fathers Would Think of the Trump Indictment

Madison’s Federalist Paper #51 was also top of mind for Barbara A. Perry, Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, specifically the famous line: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. In order to protect the governed from each other, and protect the governed from the governors, you have to establish both a constitutional system with checks and balances, as well as a legal system as one of the three branches,” Perry says. “What I’d like to think would happen, by asserting the laws of the state of New York, people would one, recognize that even a President or a former President is not above the law, or two, that the system is worth keeping and preserving and not have a person who takes a constitutional oath to uphold the system actively trying to undermine it.”

Barbara Perry

Presidential Transitions & the Freedom Agenda

Eliot and Eric welcome back Duke Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the Program on American Grand Strategy, Peter Feaver, pinch-hitting for Meghan O’Sullivan (whose illness prevented her from joining us) to discuss Hand Off, a book that Peter and Meghan (along with SOTR guest Will Inboden) edited consisting of all the Bush 43 Administration’s NSC transition memos prepared for the Obama Administration. They touch on Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and China and whether or not “the Freedom Agenda” serves as a coherent framing of the Bush Administration foreign policies, the opportunity costs with Russia and China that resulted from the focus on the War on Terror, and much more.

Eric Edelman

Edith Wilson: The first lady who fooled D.C. and ran the White House

Unless readers are aficionados of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, they may possess only vague knowledge that a debilitating stroke incapacitated him in his administration’s final year and that his wife Edith became the unofficial “acting president.” This intriguing tale of how a first lady, with minimal formal education and no government experience, effectively took the reins from the partially paralyzed chief executive and guided his White House, from October 1919 to March 1921, is as riveting as it is improbable.

Barbara Perry

The U.S. invasion of Iraq: 20 years later

A panel of foreign policy experts marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by discussing Melvyn P. Leffler’s new book, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. Looking back, what does this highly consequential foreign policy decision reveal about presidential leadership and decision making? How did Saddam Hussein's record as a brutal dictator influence the decisions made by George W. Bush? Leffler's extensive interviews with top Bush administration policymakers document the war's conflicting objectives and costly aftermath.

Philip Zelikow