Henry Wallich

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Henry Christopher Wallich (born June 10, 1914 in Berlin ; died September 16, 1988 in Washington, DC ) was an American economist and central banker of German origin.

Life

Wallich was born into a Berlin banking family; his grandfather Hermann Wallich was one of the first directors of Deutsche Bank from 1870 to 1894 . Most of the family members left Germany when the National Socialists came to power. Henry C. Wallich emigrated to South America in 1933 and then (1935) to the USA , his sister Christel settled in Argentina , his brother Walter in Great Britain , where he became a journalist for the BBC . Henry C. Wallich's father Paul Wallich committed suicide in 1938 after the November pogroms , his (non-Jewish) mother Hildegard emigrated to the USA in 1939, where she temporarily lived with Henry's family in New Haven .

Wallich initially worked in the financial sector before moving to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1941 . In 1944 Wallich took on US citizenship; In 1951 he was appointed professor of economics at Yale University. Henry C. Wallich wrote "The Mainsprings of the German Revival", a standard work on the West German economic miracle after the Second World War, at Yale and during a research semester in Frankfurt am Main .

Wallich took a leave of absence from Yale in 1958-61 to work for the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration , first as an advisor to Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson , then as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers . From 1965 to 1974 he wrote a regular column for the news magazine Newsweek , in which Wallich alternated as a moderate economist with the Keynesian Paul A. Samuelson and the monetarist Milton Friedman . Wallich later commented on his role within this trio - Samuelson and Friedman both received the Nobel Prize in Economics in the 1970s - as follows:

“I always felt that I represented common sense, whose job it was to mute the voices of genius. I haven't found out what Friedman and Samuelson thought about it. "

In 1974 Wallich was appointed by Richard Nixon to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve , to which he was a member for twelve years, and in which he made a name for himself as an opponent of inflation and an ally of Council Chairman Paul Volcker (from 1979) .

Henry C. Wallich married the American economist Mable Brown in 1950. They had three children together. Wallich died in 1988 of complications from cancer.

Fonts

  • The Mainsprings of the German Revival (1955)
  • The Cost of Freedom, Conservatives and Modern Capitalism, The Case For A Free Economy (1960)

literature

  • International Monetary Cooperation: Essays in Honor of Henry C. Wallich (1987)
  • Two generations in German banking. By Hermann Wallich and Paul Wallich, with an introduction by Henry C. Wallich. Fritz Knapp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1978. (= series of publications by the Institute for Research on Bank History, Vol. 2.)
  • Katie Hafner: The house by the bridge. The Schöningen Villa in Potsdam and its residents. Märkischer Verlag, Wilhelmshorst 2004.
  • Bernd Kulla: Wallich, Henry Christopher. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (ed.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 2: Leichter branch. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 723f.
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 791

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from Saul Engelbourg: Henry C. Wallich: a Third Generation Banker , In: the Economic and Business History Society, Vol. 19 (2001), pp. 91-102.
personal data
SURNAME Wallich, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wallich, Henry Christopher
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1988
Place of death Washington, DC