New Director of the Institute of International Monetary Research

Dr Juan Castañeda has become the first full-time Director of the Institute of International Monetary Research. Dr Castañeda, currently a lecturer in economics at The University of Buckingham, has extensive experience researching in monetary policy and central banking. In particular, he has worked as an expert adviser to the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.

The Institute of International Monetary Research’s founder is Professor Tim Congdon CBE, who has served as part-time Director during the Institute’s establishment. He is the Institute’s principal donor and is now to be its Chairman. He is usually regarded as the UK’s foremost advocate of the quantity theory of money, which today is sometimes called “monetarism”. He was heavily involved, as a commentator and adviser, in the transformation of British macroeconomic policy in the late 1970s and 1980s which led to the so-called Great Moderation of better macroeconomic outcomes from 1992 to 2007. More information on the Institute of International Monetary Research can be found at: www.mv-pt.org.

Commenting on his appointment, Dr Castañeda said, “I will be very honoured and pleased soon to become the Director of the Institute of International Monetary Research. I look forward to working closely with its founder, first Director and Chairman, Professor Congdon. Both the large body of theory linking money to nominal income and prices, and the ample empirical evidence which supports it, have been neglected in recent decades. Mainstream academics and central bankers have embraced theories that expressly reject the use of monetary aggregates in the framing of monetary policy decisions. The mission of the Institute and my primary role as its Director will be to foster solid research in this field, and to contribute to the analysis of the pivotal role of money in explaining output and price fluctuations in the economy.”