Money and the State: best relationship between monetary regime & government by Professor Tim Congdon

Money and the State: 'what is the best relationship between the monetary regime and government?' by Professor Tim Congdon

Tim Congdon is one of the world's leading monetary analysts. He advised the UK's 1979-97 Conservative government on economic policy, serving as a member of the Treasury Panel (the so-called 'Wise Men' ) from 1992 to 1997. He is usually regarded as the UK's leading exponent of the 'monetarist' school of thought, and was influential in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the defence of 'Thatcherite monetarism'.

After starting his career as a journalist on The Times, he became an economist in the City of London in 1976. He founded the research consultancy, Lombard Street Research, in 1989 after correctly warning that the excessive money growth during the Lawson Chancellorship would lead to double-digit inflation. In his period on the Treasury Panel, he emphasised the importance of monetary variables in determining macroeconomic outcomes, and the difference between his approach to forecasting and that of other Treasury Panel members.

He left Lombard Street Research in 2005, to create more time to write about monetary theory and practice. Four significant works have appeared since then. In 2005 he published a long pamphlet on Money and Asset Prices in Boom and Bust and in 2009 a critique of the Bank of England's conduct in the Northern Rock affair called Central Banking in a Free Society. In 2007 a collection of essays on Keynes, the Keynesians and Monetarism appeared in the UK and in 2011 another collection with the title Money in a Free Society was published by Encounter Books in New York.

In the macroeconomic bedlam of early 2009, he set up International Monetary Research Ltd. as a vehicle for commenting regularly on monetary developments and banking. Tim Congdon has been a successful businessman and investor, and is the founder and main patron of the Institute of International Monetary Research, as well as being its first Director.