Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi have one last job

The U.S. treasury secretary Janet Yellen and the Italian prime minister have spent decades shaping this economy. But can they control what comes next?

In recent years, the world has been regaled with stories about the crisis of expertise. The era of the liberal technocrat was over, we were told, killed off by the financial crisis and populism. But if democracies find it hard to live with expertise, it seems they can’t live without it either.

At the start of 2021, two of the most contentious capitalist democracies in the world, Italy and the United States, turned to familiar experts to chart a way out of novel political situations.