Dr. Barry Eichengreen: "The Dollar and its Discontents"

Wednesday, March 10, 2021
5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. EST on Zoom
Register for the event. This lecture will be recorded, but not live-streamed, so we encourage you to register for the Zoom event. A recording of the event will be available with your Andrew ID on our website shortly after the event takes place. 

Dollar doom and gloom is currently in fashion, with many banks and forecasters predicting that the greenback will fall by 20 percent in 2021. Four arguments are made for why the dollar is poised to fall: the post-vaccine decline in global risk; the Federal Reserve’s highly accommodative policies; America’s twin fiscal and current account deficits; and the end of the country’s geopolitical hegemony, together with the rise of China. This lecture will advance the case that all four arguments are wrong.

About Dr. Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-98 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997).

Dr. Eichengreen has held Guggenhim and Fulbright Fellowships and been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin). From 2004 to 2020 he served as convener of the Bellagio Group of academics and officials. He is a regular monthly columnist for Project Syndicate.

His most recent books are The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future with Livia Chitu and Arnaud Mehl (November 2017), The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future with Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park and Dwight H. Perkins (March 2015), Renminbi Internationalization: Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges, with Masahiro Kawai (February 2015), Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses -- and Misuses -- of History (January 2015), From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy with Dwight H. Perkins and Kwanho Shin (2012) and Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (2011) (shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011).

Dr. Eichengreen was awarded the Economic History Association's Jonathan RT Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2002 and the University of California at Berkeley Social Science Division's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004. He is the recipient of a doctor honoris causa from the American University in Paris, and the 2010 recipient of the Schumpeter Prize from the International Schumpeter Society. He was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine's 100 Leading Global Thinkers in 2011. He is a past president of the Economic History Association (2010-11 academic year).