Paper Titles & Abstracts

Alexandre Lamfalussy is especially well known as the first president of the European Monetary Institute (EMI), the predecessor of the European Central Bank. Lamfalussy pursued a three-pronged career, as a private banker, a central banker (at the Bank for International Settlements from 1976 to 1993) and an academic. Partly under the influence of Triffin, Lamfalussy soon became interested in international and European monetary issues and was an early advocate of a strengthening of European (monetary) integration. As Economic Advisor of the BIS, he participated in the meetings of the Committee of Governors and provided important intellectual inputs, just as in the Delors Committee. Typical for Lamfalussy was a profound distrust of the functioning of financial markets, very much marked by his experience of the Latin American debt crisis, wherein the banking system had provided far too ample credits to these countries. He became one of the main architects of the BIS "macro-prudential" approach. His vision of the financial markets also permeated his view of the foreign exchange markets. Lamfalussy's advocacy of European monetary integration had then its origin in two main sources: a profound European conviction, marked by the devastations of the second world war and the iron curtain, and a fundamental distrust of systems of floating exchange rates. As observed by Duisenberg, his successor at the European Monetary Institute, "You have never believed that a true single market is in the long run compatible with a quasi-floating exchange rate system".