Henry Wallich

Henry Christopher Wallich ( born June 10, 1914 in Berlin, † September 16, 1988 in Washington, DC ) was an American economist and central banker of German-Jewish origin.

Life

Wallich was born in a Berlin banking family; his grandfather Hermann Wallich was from 1870 to 1894 one of the first directors of Deutsche Bank. In the course of the seizure of power by the National Socialists left most of the family Germany. Henry C. Wallich emigrated in 1933 only to South America and then ( 1935) in the United States, his sister Christel settled in Argentina, his brother Walter in the UK, where he was a journalist with the BBC. Henry C. Wallich Paul Wallichs father committed suicide in 1938 after the November pogroms suicide, his ( non-Jewish ) mother Hildegard emigrated in 1939 to the United States, where she occasionally lived with Henry's family in New Haven.

Wallich first worked in the financial sector, before joining the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1941. 1944 Wallich took the U.S. citizenship; In 1951 he was appointed to the Yale University as a professor of economics. At Yale, and during a sabbatical in Frankfurt am Main Henry C. Wallich wrote " The Main Springs of the German Revival ," a standard work on the West German economic miracle after the Second World War.

Wallich took leave 1958-61 from Yale to work for the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, first as an adviser to the Treasury Robert B. Anderson, then as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. From 1965 to 1974 he wrote a regular column for Newsweek magazine, in which Wallich as moderate economist alternated with the Keynesian Paul A. Samuelson and the monetarist Milton Friedman. His role in this trio - Samuelson and Friedman were both in the 1970 Nobel Prize in Economics - commented Wallich later as follows:

"I always had the feeling that I represented the common sense ( ' common sense '), whose task it was to dampen the voices of genius. I have not figured out how Friedman and Samuelson thought about it. "

1974 Wallich was appointed by Richard Nixon in the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, where he served for twelve years, and in which he made ​​his name as inflation enemy and ally of the ( 1979 ) Council Chairman Paul Volcker.

Henry C. Wallich married in 1950, the U.S. economist Mable Brown. Together they had three children. Wallich died in 1988 from the effects of cancer.

Writings

• The Main Springs of the German Revival ( 1955)
• The Cost of Freedom, Conservatives and Modern Capitalism, The Case For A Free Economy (1960 )