Pentti Kouri

Pentti Kouri ( born February 12, 1949 in Kuusamo, Finland, † January 22, 2009 in Los Angeles ) was a Finnish economist, venture capitalist and art collector.

Life

Pentii Kouri was the first Finn, who received a scholarship to attend the United World College of the Atlantic. Back in Finland, he received in 1970, at the age of 21 years, a Master socket in Economics from the University of Helsinki. He was hired directly by the International Monetary Fund. There he met Michael Porter with whom he developed in 1974, the Kouri - Porter model of international capital flows. This model is now used as the basis of modern asset approach to explain the exchange rates. In 1974 he got his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Pentti Kouri was an economics professor at the universities of Stanford, Yale, Helsinki and New York.

Later he worked as an investor. He managed, for example, George Soros ' investment in Finland. Nowadays Kouri is mostly known for his involvement in the so-called " Kouri - deals" in the late 1980s. A group of investors bought largely with borrowed money, a large part of the two largest Finnish banks. The result was a shock to the Finnish economy with a restructuring of the Finnish banking landscape. The shares were sold in the wake of high profits. As a result of this transaction Koouri lost his reputation in Finland. The Finns made ​​him - as a symbol of the casino capitalism - responsible for the recession in Finland in the 1990s.

Personal

He was married to Elly O. Kouri. They were divorced in 1995. He built in the 1980s and 1990s to a famous art collection of contemporary art, which is owned by the Finnish state today. It was in Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, as Kouri Collection issued.