Bernard A. Lietaer

Bernard Lietaer 7 February 1942 4 February 2019 was a Belgian civil engineer economist author and professor He studied monetary systems and promoted the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency which circulate parallel with national currencies Bernard Lietaer was born on 7 February 1942 in Lauwe Belgium He attended College of St Paul Godinne from 1955 to 1961 He studied engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium where later in life he held an assistant professorship of international finance During his engineering studies he was a member of the debating union Olivaint Conference of Belgium After obtaining his MSc in 1967 he went on to continue his studies at the MIT until 1969 Lietaers postgraduate thesis published in 1971 included a description of floating exchanges The Nixon Shock of that same year eradicated the Bretton Woods system by decoupling the US dollar from the gold standard and inaugurated an era of universal floating exchanges Prior to that time the only floating exchanges involved some Latin American currencies The techniques which he had developed for marginal Latin American currencies were for a time the only systematic research that could be used to deal with the major currencies of the world A US bank negotiated exclusive rights to his approach and Lietaer began another career In 1987 he cofounded a currencymanagement firm called GaiaCorp and managed the offshore currency fund Gaia Hedge II which during the 198791 period was the worlds top performing managed currency fund His biography cites the Micropal survey of 1800 offshore funds In the preface to his book The Future of Money Beyond Greed and Scarcity Lietaer claimed We almost tripled the money in three years Business Week named him the worlds top currency trader in 1992 From 2003 to 2006 he was a visiting scholar at Naropa University USA where he created the universitys Marpa Center for Business and Economics While at the Central Bank in Belgium he implemented the convergence mechanism ECU to the single Europeancurrency system During that period he also served as President of Belgiums Electronic Payment System In an 2007 interview Lietaer claimed that diversified internationally valid currencies can help address specific needs and enable certain exchanges whether to fight global warming promote employment or facilitate education and health care In 2012 he was coauthor along with Christian Arnsperger Sally Goerner and Stefan Brunnhuber of Money Sustainability the missing link a publication of The Club of Rome in which he predicted that the period 20072020 would be one of financial turmoil and gradual monetary breakdown At the time of his death Lietaer lived in Hoyerhagen in northern Germany Source Article Bernard Lietaer from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30