Carmen Reinhart
My introduction to Carmen Reinhart began in 2009. Her recently published book with fellow economist Kenneth Rogoff “This Time It’s Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” quickly became required reading at work and a best seller. Two years into the financial crises the timing of the book was prescient.
The content is based on massive amounts of data. Specifically, data that documents economic crises and financial collapse across 800 years and 66 countries.
The causes of the financial crises that began in 2007 were heavily debated among economists, investors, politicians, and anyone with an opinion. “This Time It’s Different” was well under way long before the crises started.
“Our basic message is simple: We have been here before. No matter how different the latest financial frenzy or crisis always appears, there are usually remarkable similarities with past experience from other countries and from history.”
Today Carmen M. Reinhart is the Minoa A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School.* She has published extensively on international capital flows, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crisis, currency crashes and contagion.
What I find so interesting about Ms. Reinhart is that she had anything but a typical path to becoming the economics superstar she is today.
Carmen Reinhart was born in Havana, Cuba as Carmen Castellanos in 1966.
It is worth noting that the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba took place in 1961 and was one of the worst foreign policy disasters in American history. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959 Fidel Castro forged strong economic links to the Soviet Union. The economic impact of Castro’s central planning and government controls left most Cubans searching for food and desperate for better living standards.
When she was ten years old her parents fled Havana, arriving in the United States with 3 suitcases. The change in economic circumstances for the family had a lasting impact on her.
“Most kids don’t grow up with that kind of economic shock, but I learned the value of scarcity, and even the sort of tensions between East and West.”
Intending to study fashion and merchandising, on a whim she took an economics class. She attended Florida International University to study Economics. One of her professors helped her apply to the graduate program in economics at Columbia University.
She met her husband, Vincent Reinhart (also an economist and occasionally a coauthor), at Columbia. They married while in graduate school. Ms. Reinhart left graduate school before completing her dissertation.
She was hired as an economist at Bear Stearns and after three years became the chief economist.
In 1988 she returned to Columbia and obtained her Ph.D. She says that data mining is her “true love.” “I have a talent for rounding up data like cattle, all over the plain.”
I have to admit that I did not read “This Time It’s Different” cover to cover. It is dense and quantitative. However, there are several chapters that focus on the U.S. subprime crisis and the aftermath. In 2009 we were at the tip of understanding the global impact of the financial crisis.
I do enjoy her monthly columns for Project Syndicate and I would suggest visiting her website to experience the depth of her knowledge and experience. She has been called by some colleagues “the most influential female economist in the world.”
www.CarmenReinhart.com
*Carmen M. Reinhart is 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. Professor Reinhart held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s. She spent several years at the International Monetary Fund and as a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisers. She serves in the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and has been listed among Bloomberg Markets Most Influential 50 in Finance, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Thompson Reuters’ The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.
Excerpts and quotes taken from The New York Times July 3, 2010 “They Did Their Homework (800 years of it)” by Catherine Rampell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html
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