ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳

Money and Empire: A Conversation on Charles Kindleberger and the Dollar System

The role of the dollar in the global financial- and trading system has become the one of the most important topics in global economic governance and geopolitics. This has prompted new debates about the dollar’s future. In this event we looked at its past and at a major economic thinker whose life and thought are hard to untangle from it.  

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This webinar was held on 8th September 2022.

Meet the speakers and chair

Professor Perry Mehrling is a Professor of International Political Economy at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, where he teaches courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of money and finance, and international money, the first of these is available online. Mehrling is the author of ‘The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort’ (Princeton, 2011), ‘Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance’ (Wiley, 2005), and ‘The Money Interest and the Public Interest’ (Harvard, 1997). His most recent book is ‘Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System’ (Cambridge, 2022) He currently serves on the Academic Council of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (New York) and the Committee on Global Thought (Columbia University) and has served as visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, University of Nice, Paris X (Nanterre), and the Sloan School of Management, MIT.

Professor Michael Pettis is a finance professor at Peking University and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. Prior to 2002, Pettis spent fifteen years on Wall Street running fixed-income trading and capital markets desks at JP Morgan, First Boston, and Bear Stearns, where he advised Latin American, Asian and Eastern European governments on debt and balance sheet strategies. During the last nine of these years he also taught finance at Columbia University. He has published over 200 articles in various leading periodicals along with six books, the most recent of which, ‘Trade Wars Are Class Wars’ (Yale University Press, 2020), was awarded the Lionel Gelber Prize. His previous book, ‘Avoiding the Fall: China's Economic Restructuring, (Carnegie Endowment, 2013), was selected by the Financial Times as one of the top ten books on business and economics in 2013, while the one before that, ‘The Great Rebalancing’ (Princeton University Press, 2013), was selected in 2018 among Barron’s The 7 Best Books about the Financial Crisis.

Professor Adam Tooze holds the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Chair of History and is the director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, he was the Barton M. Biggs Professor at Yale University and Reader in Modern History at the University of Cambridge. In February 2011, he was the Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Professor in Military History at West Point.

Tooze is the author of several books, including ‘The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931’ (Viking, 2014) and ‘The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy’ (Penguin, 2006). His history of the financial crisis of 2008 and after, ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’ appeared in 2018, and his most recent book is ‘Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy’ (Penguin, 2021). His books have received prizes from the Leverhulme Trust and Longman History Today as well as the Wolfson Prize and the LA Times History Prize. They have been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Hessel Tiltman Prizes and featured in the annual best-book lists of the Financial Times, LA Times, Kirkus Review, Foreign Affairs, and The Economist.

Tooze’s writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, New left Review, New Statesman, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Review of books, Dissent, Die Zeit, Spiegel, Die Tageszeitung, and Sueddeutsche Zeitung. He maintains the influential subscription blog ‘Chartbook’ on Substack.

Professor Linda Yueh, is an economist, writer and broadcaster. She is a Visiting Professor at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ IDEAS and serves on the Policy Committee of the Centre for Economic Performance at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳. She is Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford and Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School. She was a Visiting Professor of Economics at Peking University. Dr Yueh is the Editor of the Routledge Series on Economic Growth and Development and the author of numerous books, including China’s Growth: The Making of an Economic Superpower and The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today.

 

ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ IDEAS () is ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳'s foreign policy think tank. Through sustained engagement with policymakers and opinion-formers, IDEAS provides a forum that informs policy debate and connects academic research with the practice of diplomacy and strategy.