Bo Cutter Bowman Cutter has been a managing director of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm headquartered in New York City, since 1996. He has served as the firm’s economist and focused on its international business, with particular reference to Asia. From 1981-1993, he was vice chairman and managing partner at Coopers & Lybrand, the global accounting and consulting firm that subsequently merged with Price Waterhouse. Mr. Cutter held a senior economic policy role in the administration of Bill Clinton, whom he served as director of the National Economic Council and as deputy assistant to the president. He also served during the Carter presidency, at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as executive director for budget. Mr. Cutter was the leader of President Obama’s OMB transition team. Mr. Cutter’s central public policy interest is economic policy, in particular issues related to economic growth, development, and the alleviation of poverty. He has worked extensively with the World Bank; he is currently the Chairman of the Board of CARE, the global development organization. He is also a founder and current chairman of MicroVest, a leading global microfinance fund with assets under management now in excess of $100 million, and a member of the governing council of the IFMR Trust, focused on market-based solutions to severe poverty in India. Mr. Cutter holds degrees from Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Health Care: I’d vote ‘yes’ on a 50.1 - 49.9 decision

Shaping the future with today’s choices.

I haven’t been complementary about this legislation; and I’m still not. But I’d vote for the health care bill in the House; and reconciliation in both houses: for one negative reason and 4 positive ones.

The Negative Reason

(1) The opposition — No matter how reasoned you try to be on an issue as bitter as health care has become, you wind up being categorized with the opposition. And I cannot stand the opposition. The Republicans have turned down chance after chance to make a substantive difference and clearly prefer to try to take down Obama than…

More on the Crisis of 2018

Shaping the future with today’s choices

As I have said in other posts, the Roosevelt Institute is starting a project we are calling “The Next American Economy: Nation-Building for our own Nation.” I will be writing about aspects of the next American economy more and more. This is a small road sign on the impending fiscal crisis.

Moody’s has just reconfirmed the U.S. government AAA bond rating, but it also said, “In light of the muted recovery, discretionary fiscal adjustment is now the principal means of repairing the damage the global crisis has inflicted on government balance sheets. [ed. note: This is…

Bowles as Budget Commission Chair is good news

The naming of Erskine Bowles as Chair of the Budget Commission to be announced by President Obama is very good news and may be the best personnel decision the President has made. We are headed for big trouble. Erskine will not come up with magic new ideas but he has the background, strength of character, and healthy disregard of Washington required to begin the process of backing out of our fiscal mess.

Unemployment as a Moral Issue

Shaping the future with today’s choices.

I am not claiming credentials here: I am not a labor economist, and I have never been unemployed. I come to my horror of unemployment genetically. I suspect that I am considerably older than most of the readers of this blog, and unlike you, the readers, I am the child of depression era parents. After the depression, my father was scared the rest of his life; he never afterwards dared even think about a job change, and he never made an on the job decision without the spectre of losing his job bearing down on…

Health Care: How a Summit Can Work

Shaping the future with today’s choices.

My first view of the summit was that it was a bad idea; one in which the risks were disproportionately being taken by President Obama. But the general gridlock in the Congress, and particularly the polls that came out at the end of last week have changed my thinking.

Just to be clear, a deep skepticism continues to be a strong minor chord in how I think about summit meetings in general, and this one in particular. Summits work best when the conclusions are reached before the summit begins, and the role of the attendees is…

Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Convention: Another Sign of the End of Civilization as We Know it?

Bo Cutter on the allure of Tea Party sweetheart Sarah Palin.

The talk shows on Sunday all concluded she was unelectable, wasn’t running, and would be stopped by the Republican powers that be anyway. (I don’t know anything about these Republican powers, but the Democratic powers that be haven’t stopped anyone, or started anyone, in decades.) Frank Rich is just generally offended that she has a weak grasp on the truth. My own sense is a lot closer to David Broder writing briefly in the Washington Post last week. Former governor Palin has a capacity to twist the emotional and psychological dials…

Straws in the Wind: The 5 Supremes

The discussion of the recent decision quickly degenerated into a charge from the Republicans that President Obama dissed the Supreme Court by stating his disagreement with their money in politics decision and, in addition, had it all wrong anyway. On the other hand, as I have thought about my larger Roosevelt Institute project, The Next American Economy, I’ve realized that climate change, the budget, globalization, the Chinese all pale as problems in comparison to our willful and growing inability to govern ourselves.

An indication of this is the brief article by Senator Orrin Hatch in the Feb 3 Politico. Senator Hatch is…

On Not Wasting a Crisis: How Obama Must Govern

Shaping the future with today’s choices.

Rahm Emanuel is famous for saying that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and then the Administration wasted one. The reason for raising this is not to look back and play whack-a-mole with Rahm or the White House, but to underline a couple of points about the future.

The Administration interpreted “not wasting a crisis” as attempting to do everything at the same time; and to move multiple very large initiatives simultaneously. I know how White House cultures work. Once the President and the Chief of Staff decide on this as the direction, no…

The State of the Union: High Marks for Style and Substance

I intend to write this week on (1)the SOTU; (2) wasting crises; (3) health care; (4) the Court Decision and Justice Alito — at least now we know he isn’t a complete solipsist; and (5) Colombia. I was traveling to Colombia during the speech and could not write immediately on the State of the Union.

So to begin there, I thought the speech was a “10″ on style and tone; and an “8″ on substance. On style and tone there are moments when the man is Roger Federer, he is poetry and zen. He struck the perfect attitude throughout. He delicately…

Obama’s Budget Freeze

Shaping the future with today’s choices.

I genuinely don’t get it.

First, while the freeze is stated as applying to domestic, discretionary budget authority, after allowing for the stimulus package of last year — which raised spending in order to increase the economic growth rate and reduce unemployment, it clearly reduces the effect of the stimulus. And that already looked too small. So the freeze runs directly counter to what turned out to be the signature policy of the administration’s first term. Second, while the numbers are small –  they amount, very roughly, to 1/6th of 1% of GDP per year accumulating year…