A Global Think-in on the past, present, and future of the international monetary system

Introduction:
Vishakha N. Desai, Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the President; Senior Research Scholar, School of International and Public Affairs; Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University

Moderator:
Katharina Pistor, Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law, Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation, Columbia University.

Discussants:
Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director of the European Institute, Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.

Perry G. Mehrling, Professor of Economics, Barnard College; Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.

Patricia C. Mosser, Senior Research Scholar, Faculty of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.

Phil Prince, Managing Director and Head of Treasury, Pine River Capital Management.

Money is both one of the great intellectual puzzles and practical problems of the modern world. Taken at face value it appears to be one of the most basic and important expressions of state sovereignty. It defines the boundaries of national economies and their interrelationships. Printing and coining money is a closely guarded privilege of the state. And yet at moments of crisis we discover and rediscover the disconcerting fact that purchasing power in the most important currencies of the world is in fact generated in oceanic quantities beyond the boundaries of the states to which it belongs, by actors that are not the state. We live, in fact, in a world of global money. Learning how to think this radical fact is an urgent challenge, one which must by necessity be global in scope and involve both academics and the practitioners who are in the business of operating and innovating the global monetary system." />

April 25, 2016

A Global Think-in on the Past, Present, and Future of the Global Monetary System

April 25, 2016 · 3:30-5:00PM

Columbia University, Buell Hall (Maison Française), East Gallery

The Committee on Global Thought (CGT) presented a GLOBAL THINK-IN with Columbia University history professor, Committee on Global Thought member, and author of “The Deluge” Adam Tooze, and Barnard College economics professor Perry G. Mehrling.

• Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director of the European Institute, Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.
• Perry G. Mehrling, Professor of Economics, Barnard College; Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.
• Patricia C. Mosser, Senior Research Scholar, Faculty of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.
• Phil Prince, Managing Director and Head of Treasury, Pine River Capital Management.
• Katharina Pistor (moderator), Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law, Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation, Columbia University.

About Global Money

Money is both one of the great intellectual puzzles and practical problems of the modern world. Taken at face value it appears to be one of the most basic and important expressions of state sovereignty. It defines the boundaries of national economies and their interrelationships. Printing and coining money is a closely guarded privilege of the state. And yet at moments of crisis we discover and rediscover the disconcerting fact that purchasing power in the most important currencies of the world is in fact generated in oceanic quantities beyond the boundaries of the states to which it belongs, by actors that are not the state. We live, in fact, in a world of global money. Learning how to think this radical fact is an urgent challenge, one which must by necessity be global in scope and involve both academics and the practitioners who are in the business of operating and innovating the global monetary system.

Learn more about Global Money.

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Registration

Please note that this event is closed.

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History, Director of the European Institute, and Member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. His research includes “Statistics and the German State 1900-1945” which explores the connection between the emergence of modern national economic statistics and the crisis of the German state in the first half of the twentieth century. “Wages of Destruction” provides a novel account of the Third Reich viewed from the perspective of the regime’s efforts to harness the German economy for its bid for continental hegemony. His most recent book, "The Deluge" is an analysis of the First World War that challenges the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. He is currently completing a new global history of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007 and after.

Perry G. Mehrling is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College, and Member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. At Barnard, Professor Mehrling teaches courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of finance, and the financial dimensions of the U.S. retirement, health, and education systems. Professor Mehrling's research focuses on the foundations of monetary economics and the history and applications of monetary economics and finance. He aims to develop a theory of money that takes as its starting point the inside credit character of modern money, in order to integrate monetary economics with modern finance, and so contribute to an alternative money theoretical basis for macroeconomics. Professor Mehrling is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Eastern Economics Association, and the Economists Forum at the Financial Times.

Trish Mosser is a Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow at SIPA and the founding director of a new SIPA initiative on central banking, monetary policy and prudential oversight. Previously, Mosser was Deputy Director and head of Research and Analysis for the Office of Financial Research (OFR) at U.S. Department of Treasury, overseeing an interdisciplinary team of researchers working on a variety of financial stability topics. Mosser spent over 20 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as both a researcher and monetary policy practitioner. Previously she had served as an economist in the New York Fed Research Department, managing both the Macroeconomics and Capital Markets research areas, and she was an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Columbia. She has written extensively on monetary policy and financial stability topics including financial crisis policy tools, financial structure and the monetary policy transmission mechanism, financial reform post crisis and housing finance reform. Mosser serves on the Bank of England’s Macro Prudential Advisory Committee and has served as a member of the Deputies Committee of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), on the Board of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) and on numerous international central banking and financial policy committees.

Phil Prince joined Pine River Capital Management as managing director, head of Treasury in April 2014. At Pine River, Mr. Prince is responsible for all aspects of financing, collateral, and cash management in the firm’s fund businesses. Prior to joining Pine River, Mr. Prince was a managing director and the head of Central Funding in the Investment Management Division of Goldman Sachs. He managed a team responsible for financing, cash management and liquidity risk management. Mr. Prince joined Goldman Sachs in 1983 as an associate in the Treasury Department. During his tenure at Goldman, he held a variety of positions including trading repurchase agreements, trading US Treasuries, trading and underwriting GSE debt, and managing US Dollar funding for GS Group. Prior to joining Goldman, Mr. Prince was a consultant in the Financial Services consulting practice at Arthur Andersen & Co. Mr. Prince received a Masters of Business Administration in Finance and Accounting from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and attended Vanderbilt University, where he studied Economics and Philosophy.

Katharina Pistor is the Walter E. Meyer Research Professor in Law & Social Problems and the Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She is also the Director of the Law School’s Center on Global Legal Transformation. She previously taught at the Kennedy School of Government, and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany and the Harvard Institute for International Development. In the 1990s she worked predominantly on transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, where she conducted extensive field research. Since then, her research has expanded to other emerging markets (in East Asia) and the impact of globalization on the transformation of law and legal institutions in the areas of finance, property rights and transnational regulation. She is Principal Investigator of the “Global Finance and Law Initiative,” a collaborative research project aimed at re-conceptualizing the relation between finance and law, funded by INET. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the European Corporate Governance Institute, a Research Associate of the Center for Economic Policy Research and an Editor of “Economics of Transition." In 2012 she received the Max Planck Research Award for her contributions to international financial regulation.

Directions

The Think-in took place in the East Gallery of Buell Hall (Maison Française) at Columbia University.