The Fed’s links with academia: BIS edition
A lot has been made of the Federal Reserve’s close links with Ivy League academics, some of whom also consult for private banks. See, for instance, this paper by Gerald Epstein and Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth, which looks at the whether there is a relationship between economists’ positions on financial regulation and who they’re working for.
No-one, however, has gone as far as to claim that the universities may be considered part of the Fed itself. Read more
Central bankers’ euro bashing
Sir Mervyn King has twice of late attacked eurozone officials’ line on the region’s sovereign debt crisis, first at the inaugural Financial Policy Committee press briefing, then to parliament last Tuesday. On both occasions he trashed the view that the crisis was a problem of liquidity, not solvency, saying that unless officials accepted that sovereigns were broke, “we will never find an answer to it”.
He is not the only European central banker whose recent barbs have challenged the eurozone orthodoxy. Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
