Alan Blinder | |
---|---|
![]() | |
15th Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve | |
In office June 27, 1994 –January 31, 1996 | |
President | Bill Clinton |
Preceded by | David W. Mullins Jr. |
Succeeded by | Alice Rivlin |
Member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors | |
In office June 27,1994 –January 31,1996 | |
President | Bill Clinton |
Preceded by | David W. Mullins Jr. |
Succeeded by | Alice Rivlin |
Personal details | |
Born | New York City,U.S. | October 14,1945
Education | Princeton University (BA) London School of Economics (MS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD) |
Academic career | |
Field | Macroeconomics |
School or tradition | New Keynesian economics |
Doctoral advisor | Robert Solow |
Doctoral students | Julio Rotemberg |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
Alan Stuart Blinder ( /ˈblaɪndər/ ,born October 14,1945) is an American economics professor at Princeton University and is listed among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. [1] He is a leading macroeconomist,politically liberal,and a champion of Keynesian economics and policies. [2]
Binder served on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from January 1993 to June 1994 [3] and as the Vice Chairman of the U.S. “Fed”(Federal Reserve System) from June 1994 to January 1996. [4]
His academic work has focused particularly on monetary policy and central banking, [5] and on the "offshoring" of jobs. His writing has been published in The New York Times , The Washington Post ,as well as a monthly column in The Wall Street Journal . Regarding the financial crisis of 2007–2008,Blinder drew ten lessons for fellow economists,including “It can happen here”and “Fraud and near-fraud can rise to attain macroeconomic significance.” [6] [7]
Blinder was born to a Jewish family [8] in Brooklyn,New York. He graduated from Syosset High School in Syosset,New York. Blinder attended Princeton University as an undergraduate student and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics in 1967. He completed a 130-page long senior thesis,titled "The Theory of Corporate Choice". [9] He received an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics in 1968 [4] and received a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. [4] He was advised by Robert Solow. [10]
Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton where he has been since 1971;from 1988 to 1990,he chaired the economics department. [4] Also in 1990,he founded Princeton's Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. And he has served as vice-chair of The Observatory Group.[ citation needed ]
Since 1978,Blinder has been a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. [11] He is a past president of the Eastern Economic Association and Vice President of the American Economic Association and was named a Distinguished Fellow of the latter in 2011. [4] He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1991),a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1996, [12] and a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations (since 2008). [13] Blinder's textbook Economics:Principles and Policy,co-written with William Baumol,was first published in 1979 and,in 2012 was printed in its twelfth edition. [14]
In 2009 Blinder was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science,"for his distinguished scholarship on fiscal policy,monetary policy and the distribution of income,and for consistently bringing that knowledge to bear on the public arena." [15] He is a strong proponent of free trade. [16] [ non-primary source needed ] Blinder has been critical of the public discussion of the US national debt,describing it as generally ranging from "ludicrous to horrific". [17]
In 1975,Blinder served as the Deputy Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office.
In the 1990s,he served on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from January 1993 to June 1994, [3] [4] and as the 15th Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from June 27,1994,to January 31,1996 (more specifically as the Vice Chairman of Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System). [4]
As Vice Chairman,Blinder cautioned against raising interest rates too quickly to slow inflation because of the lags in earlier rises feeding through into the economy. He also warned against ignoring the short term costs in terms of unemployment that inflation-fighting could cause. [18]
Many have argued that Blinder's stint at the Fed was cut short because of his tendency to challenge chairman Alan Greenspan. In particular,by challenging assumptions,Blinder disrupted “the whole pipeline of Greenspan-arriving-at-decisions.” [19]
He was an adviser to Al Gore and John Kerry during their respective presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004. [4]
Blinder was an early advocate of a "Cash for Clunkers" program, in which the government buys some of the oldest, most-polluting vehicles and scraps them. In July 2008, he wrote an article in The New York Times advocating such a program, [20] which was implemented by the Obama administration during the summer of 2009. [21] Blinder asserted it could stimulate the economy, benefit the environment, and reduce income inequality. [20] The program was praised by President Obama for "exceeding expectations," [22] but criticized for economic and environmental reasons. [23] [24] [25] [26]
Blinder was a co-founder and a vice-chair of the Promontory Interfinancial Network, LLC.[ citation needed ]
After his service as the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, Blinder, along with several former regulators, founded a company that offers a number of services that provide a means for depositors (including governmental entities, nonprofits, businesses, as well as individuals such as retirees) to access millions in Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) coverage at a single institution instead of multiple ones.[ citation needed ] This provides banks that are members the ability to offer coverage above the FDIC per account/per bank limit by letting those banks place funds into CDs or deposit accounts issued by other network banks. This occurs in increments below the standard FDIC insurance maximum ($250,000) so that both principal and interest are eligible for FDIC insurance. [27] The company acts as a sort of clearinghouse, matching deposits from one institution with another. [27] Through its services it allows access to higher levels of FDIC insurance although limits apply. [28]
Blinder draws 10 lessons for fellow economists in a 2014 article entitled "What Did We Learn from the Financial Crisis, the Great Recession, and the Pathetic Recovery?” which include: [6] [29] [30] [ non-primary source needed ]
5) Fraud and near-fraud can rise to attain macroeconomic significance.
6) Excessive complexity is not just anti-competitive, it's dangerous.
7) Go-for-broke incentives will induce traders to go for broke.
In a 2019 article entitled "The Free-Trade Paradox: The Bad Politics of a Good Idea," Blinder states that the main focus of the economics profession has been on how to use price signals to produce goods and services as cheaply as possible and how to distribute these goods and services (also using price signals). Jobs are viewed as secondary at best, and in fact often as a distinct negative and as something people put up with only to get the money to afford their own consumption. [31]
Blinder writes, “What if people care as much (or more) about their role as producers -- about their jobs -- as they do about the goods and services they consume? That would mean economists have been barking up the wrong tree for more than two centuries.” [31]
Blinder still thinks there’s an excellent case to be made in favor of trade, but it’s not the case economists typically make. [31]
Keynesian economics are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. Instead, it is influenced by a host of factors – sometimes behaving erratically – affecting production, employment, and inflation.
In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction when there is a general decline in economic activity. Recessions generally occur when there is a widespread drop in spending. This may be triggered by various events, such as a financial crisis, an external trade shock, an adverse supply shock, the bursting of an economic bubble, or a large-scale anthropogenic or natural disaster.
In economics, stagflation or recession-inflation is a situation in which the inflation rate is high or increasing, the economic growth rate slows, and unemployment remains steadily high. It presents a dilemma for economic policy, since actions intended to lower inflation may exacerbate unemployment.
Business cycles are intervals of expansion followed by recession in economic activity. These changes have implications for the welfare of the broad population as well as for private institutions. Typically business cycles are measured by examining trends in a broad economic indicator such as Real Gross Domestic Production.
Monetary economics is the branch of economics that studies the different competing theories of money: it provides a framework for analyzing money and considers its functions, and it considers how money can gain acceptance purely because of its convenience as a public good. The discipline has historically prefigured, and remains integrally linked to, macroeconomics. This branch also examines the effects of monetary systems, including regulation of money and associated financial institutions and international aspects.
William Jack Baumol was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at New York University, Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He was a prolific author of more than eighty books and several hundred journal articles.
John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Kenneth Saul Rogoff is an American economist and chess Grandmaster. He is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics at Harvard University.
Ben Shalom Bernanke is an American economist who served as the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. After leaving the Fed, he was appointed a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year. Before becoming Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave. Bernanke was awarded the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, jointly with Douglas Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig, "for research on banks and financial crises", more specifically for his analysis of the Great Depression.
The Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) is an economic theory developed by the Austrian School of economics about how business cycles occur. The theory views business cycles as the consequence of excessive growth in bank credit due to artificially low interest rates set by a central bank or fractional reserve banks. The Austrian business cycle theory originated in the work of Austrian School economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 in part for his work on this theory.
A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and many recessions coincided with these panics. Other situations that are often called financial crises include stock market crashes and the bursting of other financial bubbles, currency crises, and sovereign defaults. Financial crises directly result in a loss of paper wealth but do not necessarily result in significant changes in the real economy.
Modern Monetary Theory or Modern Money Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires. MMT is opposed to the mainstream understanding of macroeconomic theory and has been criticized heavily by many mainstream economists.
Maurice Moses "Maury" Obstfeld is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and previously Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics honors renowned researchers who have made influential contributions to the fields of finance and money and macroeconomics, and whose work has led to practical and policy-relevant results. It is awarded biannually, since 2005, by the Center for Financial Studies (CFS), in partnership with Goethe University Frankfurt, and is sponsored by Deutsche Bank Donation Fund. The award carries an endowment of €50,000, which is donated by the Stiftungsfonds Deutsche Bank im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft.
Following the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, there was a worldwide resurgence of interest in Keynesian economics among prominent economists and policy makers. This included discussions and implementation of economic policies in accordance with the recommendations made by John Maynard Keynes in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, most especially fiscal stimulus and expansionary monetary policy.
Carmen M. Reinhart is a Cuban-American economist and the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a member of American Economic Association, Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, and the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. She became the subject of general news coverage when mathematical errors were found in a research paper she co-authored.
John Howland Cochrane is an American economist specializing in financial economics and macroeconomics. Formerly a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago, Cochrane serves full-time as the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Richard Andreas Werner is a German banking and development economist who is a university professor at De Montfort University.
The Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance (JRC) is a leading research center at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) of Princeton University. Founded in 2011, the JRC primarily promotes research on public policy as it relates to financial markets and macroeconomics. The center has also expanded its research and teaching to multiple disciplines, including economics, operations research, political science, history, and ethics.
Előd Takáts is a Hungarian economist, professor, former senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements and visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been serving as rector of Corvinus University of Budapest since 1 August 2021.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)