Press release: New Institute of International Monetary Research launched

11 June 2015

A new Institute of International Monetary Research, led by leading UK monetarist Professor Tim Congdon, CBE, and supported by The University of Buckingham, is being launched today (Thursday 11 June).

It will promote research into how developments in banking and finance affect the wider economy. Its wider aims are to enhance economic knowledge, and so to help policy-makers seek price stability, steady economic growth and high unemployment.

The Institute’s research will particularly focus on the effect of changes in the quantity of money on inflation and deflation, and on boom and bust. The research and analyses are to be international in scope. Trends in the rate of growth of the quantity of money in the leading nations are to be monitored and discussed.

The Institute’s founder and first Director, Professor Tim Congdon, has given talks and seminars in the university. Two of the Institute’s three Deputy Directors, Dr Juan Castaneda and Dr Ali Kabiri, are members of the University’s economics faculty. Professor Congdon said: “The Great Recession showed that banking matters enormously to the economy’s behaviour. But economists are unsure about exactly how banks and the economy interact. The Institute of International Monetary Research will explore the relationships between money, banking and the economy, and promote analysis of these very important issues of public policy. I am very grateful to The University of Buckingham for providing the Institute with a home, and look forward to working with my new colleagues in the next few years.”

Professor Congdon spent most of his career as an economist in the City of London. Initially, he advised brokerage firms and their clients, but in 1989 he set up a consultancy business, Lombard Street Research. His research approach enabled him to forecast correctly that the rapid growth in the UK’s quantity of money from 1986 to 1988 would lead to much higher inflation and bust. From 1993 to 1997 Congdon served on the Treasury Panel of Independent Forecasters, where he represented the so-called “monetarist” point of view in advice to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1997 he was appointed CBE or “services to economic debate”.

Congdon retired from the City in 2005, to have more time to write up books and papers, and in 2009 started up a consultancy company, International Monetary Research Ltd.