Bernard Lietaer

Bernard Lietaer, 2011.

Bernard Lietaer (born in 1942 in Lauwe, Belgium) is a civil engineer, economist, author and professor. He studies monetary systems and promotes the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.

Bernard Lietaer, the author of "The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity" and the forthcoming "Of Human Wealth," has been active in the realm of money systems for close to 40 years in a wide variety of functions. With the publication of his post-graduate thesis at MIT in 1971 (which included a description of "floating exchanges") and the Nixon Shock of that same year which eradicated the Bretton Woods system by unhinging the US dollar value from its gold standard and inaugurated the new era of universal floating exchanges (previous to that time the only "floating exchanges" involved some exotic currencies in Latin America), the fledgling management consultant suddenly found himself to be at the center of the financial world's attention. The techniques that he had developed for those marginal Latin American currencies were overnight the only systematic research which could be used to deal with all of the major currencies of the world. A major US bank negotiated exclusive rights to his approach which required that he begin another career. While at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of 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. His consultant experience in monetary aspects on four continents ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries.

He co-founded one of the largest and most successful currency management firms; GaiaCorp, and managed an offshore currency fund (Gaia Hedge II) which was the world's top performing managed currency fund during the '87-'91 period he ran it. Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992.

Lietaer currently lives in Brussels, Belgium. He was Visiting Scholar at Naropa University from 2003 - 2006 where he designed and implemented the University's Marpa Center for Business and Economics. He studied engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, and held an Assistant Professorship of International Finance at the same university. He was also a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California, Berkeley.

Within his books he describes and draws from the perceptions of Freiwirtschaft. He is the originator of a complementary currency called the terra.

Bibliography

• The Future of Money (London: Random House, 2001)
• Of Human Wealth (forthcoming)
• Hallsmith, Gwendolyn; Lietaer, Bernard (2011-05-28). Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies. New Society Publishers. ISBN 9780865716674. 

External links

• Bernard Lietaer's Homepage
• Interview with Dr. Bernard Lietaer
• Interview with monetary specialist Bernard Lietaer on banks, the crisis and creative solutions 1/4/2009
• Economic Insights from Bernard Lietaer 2/10/2009
• Bernard Lietaer teleseminar on "New Money for a New World"
• The Money Fix Podcast #02: Bernard Lietaer
• Bernard Lietaer's lecture
• Bernard Lietaer's blog at Reality Sandwich
• A World in Balance?
• "From the real economy to the speculative" (excerpts) by Bernard Lietaer
• An interview with Bernard Lietaer
• Community Currencies: A New Tool for the 21st Century
• Another interview with Bernard Lietaer
• A discussion about these interviews
• Excerpts from his book, "The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World"
• (video) Bernard Lietaer for an NHK Japan documentary on complementary currency systems and Silvio Gesell
• Short biography