Guest Speaker: Éric Monnet

Full Professor, School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris (EHESS) & Paris School of Economics

Éric Monnet is an economic historian and macroeconomist seeking to better understand how the evolution of finance, state intervention in credit markets, central banking and the international monetary system has shaped European economies since the 19th century. Understanding where we come from should be an essential contribution to current policy debates.

Éric has mainly conducted research in four areas: (1) central bank credit policy, highlighting the historical and current role of policy instruments other than interest rates and how central bank actions interact with other state credit policies; (2) banking crises during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and in particular how bank deposits shifted to non-bank savings institutions and the economic consequences of the lack of policy response to this flight-to-safety and credit crunch; (3) the evolution of the international monetary system since the end of the 19th century, and how governments and central banks try to cope with globalization through various means (monetary cooperation, central bank balance sheet adjustments, capital and credit controls, etc.); (4) the methodology of economic history, in particular the different forms of causality used in historical research.