Euro Debt Crisis:
How Will It Evolve and How Will It Reshape the World?
Date : 27th, May
Time: 7:00pm--9:00pm
Location: Zhifuxuan Classroom
Speaker: Mr. Willem Buiter
Language:English
Speaker Biography:
Willem Buiter CBE, FBA, is Chief Economist of Citi since January 2010. His previous appointment was Professor of Political Economy at the LSE. He has a BA from Cambridge and a Ph. D. from Yale. He has held academic appointments at Princeton, the University of Bristol, the LSE, Yale and Cambridge. He has published on macroeconomics, monetary and exchange rate management, financial markets and institutions, fiscal policy, social security reform, economic development, emerging markets and transition economics.
He was a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England from 1997 till 2000 and Chief Economist and Special Counselor to the President at the EBRD from 2000 till 2005. He has been an advisor to the IMF, the World Bank, other multilateral institutions, national governments and central banks. He has been a Senior Advisor to Goldman Sachs International and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of APG Investments. He writes Maverecon, an economics blog, for the Financial Times.
Together with his wife, Professor Anne Sibert of Birkbeck, U. of London, Mr. Buiter predicted the collapse of Iceland's banking system and the inability of the Icelandic government to save it in early 2008. And In his blog Mavercon, he argued, as early as July and August 2007 that central banks would have to act as Market Maker of Last Resort and not just as Lender of Last Resort. In 2008, Mr. Buiter predicted that a sovereign debt crisis in the advanced industrial countries was the inevitable outcome of the pass-the-baby game of excessive debt from the household sector to the banks, then to the government and, finally, back to the household sector through tax increases, public spending cuts, sovereign default or attempts to inflate the real value of the public debt.
