VIPs

Jean-Claude Trichet

Willem Frederik "Wim" Duisenberg

• "..."I hear them out, but I do not obey them"..."
• CV

Robert Zoellick

• "...Leading powers are not going to accept the SDR as a new global reserve currency, nor the IMF as a global central bank..."
• Zoellick meets Sarkozy: PARIS, Dec 22, 2010
  World Bank President Robert Zoellick reaffirmed his proposal to use gold as a "reference point" to reform the current international monetary system on Wednesday in Paris.
  "What I suggested is that gold serves as a key reference point to allow people to assess the relations between different currencies," Zoellick told the press here at the end of his meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the Elysee Palace.
  "It's an approach that we can take, others also estimate that we can establish a benchmark against prices of principal commodities," the World Bank president said in response to a journalist's question. 

Paul Volcker

• "....I want to go backwards so we have a firmer future " 

 Mark Carney

•  Restoring faith in the international monetary system, BIS
  "I will argue today that there is no miracle cure. Faith is required, but not in a barbarous relic or a utopian global central bank. Rather, countries must restore their faith in the adjustment process under the current system"

Richard Heinberg

• A professor from Santa Rosa, California argues that a newly declassified CIA document shows that the U.S. used oil prices as leverage against the economy of the Soviet Union:

The Memorandum predicts an impending peak in Soviet oil production 'not later than the early 1980s' (the actual peak occurred in 1987 at 12.5 million barrels per day, following a preliminary peak in 1983 of 12.5 Mb/d). 'During the next decade,' the unnamed authors of the document conclude, 'the USSR may well find itself not only unable to supply oil to Eastern Europe and the West on the present scale, but also having to compete for OPEC oil for its own use.' The Memorandum predicts that the oil peak will have important economic impacts: 'When oil production stops growing, and perhaps even before, profound repercussions will be felt on the domestic economy of the USSR and on its international economic relations.'

...Soon after assuming office in 1981, the Reagan Administration abandoned the established policy of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and instead instituted a massive arms buildup; it also fomented proxy wars in areas of Soviet influence, while denying the Soviets desperately needed oil equipment and technology. Then, in the mid-1980s, Washington persuaded Saudi Arabia to flood the world market with cheap oil. Throughout the last decade of its existence, the USSR pumped and sold its oil at the maximum possible rate in order to earn foreign exchange income with which to keep up in the arms race and prosecute its war in Afghanistan. Yet with markets awash with cheap Saudi oil, the Soviets were earning less even as they pumped more. Two years after their oil production peaked, the economy of the USSR crumbled and its government collapsed.

 Charles W. Freeman, Jr.

• In 1991, while he was US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Freeman gave an interview listing ways that Saudi Arabia had been helpful to the US. It contributed $13.5 billion to the 1991 Gulf War effort and provided fuel, water, accommodations and transport for US forces on Saudi soil. Immediately after the war it rapidly increased its oil production, preventing the US recession "from becoming far worse." He also stated Saudi Arabia continued to insist that oil be in dollars "in part out of friendship with the United States." He warned that with the "emergence of other currencies and with strains in the relationship" Saudi Arabians might begin to question why they should do so.

Robert Mundell

• Robert Mundell, CC (born October 24, 1932) is a Nobel-Price-winning Canadian economist. Currently, Mundell is a professor of economics at Columbia University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1999 for his pioneering work in monetary dynamics and optimum currency areas. Mundell laid the groundwork for the introduction of the Euro through this work and helped to start the movement known as supply-side economics. Mundell is also known for the Mundell–Fleming model and Mundell–Tobin effect.   

Alexandre Lamfalussy

• The role of monetary gold over the next ten years

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi

• (born 29 November 1956 in Florence) is an Italian economist who has been a Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) since June 2005. In the ECB Executive Board he is responsible for international and European relations and for the legal department of the Bank and for its administration, including the building of a new site for the ECB in the Frankfurt Grossmarkthalle.
  
  Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a descendant of several old Tuscan noble houses, and of St. Robert Bellarmine, grew up in Brussels (Belgium), acquiring a knowledge of foreign languages at an early age. In 1974 he graduated from the Lycee Francais de Bruxelles. In 1978 he graduated in Economics from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). In 1980 he received a master's degree in Economics from the University of Southern California; and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1988.

• Tommaso provided the conceptual and economic rationale for a greater involvement by central banks in this area. A smooth functioning of payment systems is essential to ensure that money performs one of its key functions, being a ‘means of exchange’. Ensuring an adequate means of exchange (i.e. confidence in the currency and its adequate and effective circulation) is one reason why central banks were originally established. Central bank money is indeed universally recognised as the safest mean of exchange and therefore as the ultimate means to discharge financial obligations. Smooth functioning of payment systems is also crucial for the effective conduct of monetary policy and financial stability ~ecb

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa

• Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, Knight Grand Cross (23 July 1940 – 18 December 2010) was an Italian banker and economist who was Italy's Minister of Economy and Finance from May 2006 until May 2008.
    Born in Belluno, he graduated from Bocconi University, Milan in 1966 and received a Master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. After a first job in Germany with the retailer C&A Brenninkmeijer, he joined the Bank of Italy in 1968, eventually becoming Vice-Director General from 1984 to 1997. In 1980 he became a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty and remained one till his death. From 1993 to 1997, he was also president of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. In 1997–1998 he was head of Consob, Italy's stock market supervision agency.
  Padoa-Schioppa was a member of the European Central Bank's six-member executive board from its foundation in 1998 until the end of May 2005. In October 2005 he became president of Paris-based think tank Notre Europe.
  From October 2007 to April 2008 he was Chairman of the IMFC (International Monetary and Financial Committee), the top policy steering committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
• Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa was President of Notre Europe (2005-2010) and Chairman of Promontory Europe. He was Chairman of the Trustees of the IFRS foundation & International Financial Reporting Standards. He was Italian Minister of Economy and Finance (2006-08) and Chairman of the Ministerial Committee of the International Monetary Fund (2007-2008). In 1998-2005 he was member of the first Executive Board of the European Central Bank. Previously he was Chairman of Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa (CONSOB, 1997-98), Deputy Director General of the Banca d’Italia (1984-97) and Director General for Economic and Financial Affairs at the Commission of the European Communities (1979-83). He has been corapporteur of the Delors Committee (1988-89), Chairman of the Banking Advisory Committee of the EC (1988-91), Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (1993-97) and Chairman of the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems (2000-05). He graduated from the Luigi Bocconi University and had a M.Sc. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa has died on 18th December 2010 in Rome. He was 70 years old.

Cees Maas

 Irving Fisher

• (February 27, 1867 – April 29, 1947) was an American economist, health campaigner, and eugenicist, and one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation often regarded as belonging instead to the Post-Keynesian school.[1] Fisher was perhaps the first celebrity economist, but his reputation during his lifetime was irreparably harmed by his public statements, just prior to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, claiming that the stock market had reached "a permanently high plateau." His subsequent theory of debt deflation as an explanation of the Great Depression was largely ignored in favor of the work of John Maynard Keynes. His reputation has since recovered in neoclassical economics, particularly after his work was popularized in the late 1950s and more widely due to an increased interest in debt deflation in the Late-2000s recession.
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