Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen’s Background

He has done research and published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system. He received his BA from UC Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1979. He was a senior policy advisor to the International Monetary Fund in 1997 and 1998, although he has since been critical of the IMF.

His best known work is the book Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939, Oxford University Press, 1992.

The main evidence Eichengreen adduces in support of this view is the fact that countries that abandoned the gold standard earlier saw their economies recover more quickly.

His most cited paper is Bayoumi and Eichengreen “Shocking Aspects of European Monetary Unification” (1993) which argued that the European Union was less suitable as a Single Currency Area than the United States. This diagnosis was confirmed in 2011 when external shocks caused the Eurozone Crisis.

From 2010 to 2011, he was President of the Economic History Association. In addition to this, he is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.