Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Feldstein

A sober confession dressed up as a technocrat’s shrug, Feldstein’s line lands because it refuses the comforting myth that economists are fluent in every dialect of policy. “Particularly” does a lot of work: it implies competence elsewhere, but draws a bright circle around one stubborn weak spot. And “poor” is blunt by the standards of a profession that usually hides uncertainty behind models and margins of error.

The phrase “open economy issues” is insider shorthand with political bite. It’s not merely trade theory or exchange-rate mechanics; it’s the whole messy ecosystem of globalization: capital flows that outrun regulators, currencies that move faster than wages, supply chains that turn domestic policy into an international negotiation. Feldstein is hinting at a recurring embarrassment: macroeconomics can be elegant in a closed-economy classroom, then suddenly fragile when confronted with mobile capital, cross-border tax arbitrage, and crises that hop continents.

Context matters. Feldstein’s career spanned the rise of financial globalization, the liberalization waves of the 1980s and 1990s, and the periodic reckoning of crises. In that world, the most consequential questions are also the ones with the least stable assumptions: how independent monetary policy really is, whether deficits “matter” when foreigners finance them, how to weigh efficiency gains against distributional fallout.

The subtext is also institutional: policymakers love clean answers; open-economy reality punishes certainty. Feldstein isn’t just admitting a gap in the literature. He’s warning that confident prescriptions about trade, capital mobility, and global integration often exceed what the tools can responsibly deliver.