Bernard Lietaer (7 February 1942 – 4 February 2019) was a Belgian

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, and educator. He studied

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s and promoted the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.

Early life

Bernard Lietaer was born 7 February 1942 in Lauwe,

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

. 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 International finance (also referred to as international monetary economics or international macroeconomics) is the branch of monetary economics, monetary and macroeconomics, macroeconomic interrelations between two or more countries. Internation ...

. During his engineering studies, he was a member of the debating union Olivaint Conference of Belgium. After obtaining his M.Sc. in 1967, he went on to continue his studies at the

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until 1969.

Career

Lietaer's post-graduate

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, published in 1971, included a description of "floating exchanges". The Nixon Shock of that same year eradicated the

Bretton Woods system The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among 44 countries, including the United States, Canada, Western European countries, and Australia, after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement until the ...

by decoupling the US dollar from the

gold standard A gold standard is a backed currency, monetary system in which the standard economics, economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to the ...

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 co-founded the currency-management firm GaiaCorp and managed the offshore currency fund "Gaia Hedge II", which during the 1987–1991 period was the world's top-performing managed currency fund. His biography cites the Micropal survey of 1,800 off-shore 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." ''

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'' named him "the world's top currency trader" in 1992. From 2003 to 2006, he was a visiting scholar at

Naropa University Naropa University is a private university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, it is named after the 11th-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda. The university ...

, USA, where he created the university's Marpa Center for Business and Economics. While at the Central Bank in Belgium, he implemented the convergence mechanism ( ECU) to the single European-currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium's Electronic Payment System. In a 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 co-author, 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 2007–2020 ould beone of financial turmoil and gradual monetary breakdown.""Money & Sustainability:the missing link"
, News release d The Club of Rome

Personal life and death

At the time of his death, Lietaer lived in

Hoyerhagen Hoyerhagen is a municipality in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the ...

, in northern

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

Bibliography

* The Future of Money (London: Random House, 2001) * New Money for a New World (Qiterra Press 2011) (with Stephen Belgin) *
People Money: The Promise of Regional Currencies
(with Margrit Kennedy and John Rogers) (Triarchy Press 2012)
Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link / A report from the Club of Rome
(with Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner and Stefan Brunnhuber), Triarchy Press Ltd, 30. May 2012, * Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity (with Jacqui Dunne) (Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2013), *With Helga Preuss, Marek Hudon, Kristof de Spiegeleer, Dieter Legat & Cary Sherburne: Towards a sustainable world. Delta Institute - Dieter Legat E.U. 2019,

References

External links

*
New Money for a New World

Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lietaer, Bernard 1942 births 2019 deaths Belgian economists Catholic University of Leuven alumni Freiwirtschaft Monetary reformers Naropa University faculty Academic staff of the Université catholique de Louvain Members of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts