Lael Brainard likes to chart her journey to the top ranks of American economic policymaking by starting with her childhood observations.
As the daughter of a US diplomat stationed in Poland and West Germany, Brainard was making “mental checklists” of the contrasting fortunes of communities around her in cold war Europe. On one side of the Iron Curtain was the “grey bleakness of communist factories and poorly stocked shelves”; on the other were the “new cars and thriving small businesses” of the west.
“Once I started working, I found myself compiling these checklists in Maggie Thatcher’s industrial towns, in auto assembly plants in Detroit, in financial crisis-stricken Mexico City, in agricultural towns in Senegal,” she said during a commencement address at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington last May.