Robert Triffin

Nationality

Belgium/U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1911

Date of Death

1993

Political
Preference

Robert Triffin was a Belgian-American economist. After finishing his undergraduate degree at the Catholic University of Leuven, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1938 and taught there from 1939 to 1942. He worked at the Federal Reserve System (FRS), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC).

Triffin played a key role in the international and European monetary debates in the post-war period. His book Gold and the Dollar Crisis (1960) was highly influential, and heavily criticized the Bretton Woods system. His empirical analyses on the Belgian economy during the Great Depression led him to believe that the international adjustment process was not functioning according to the classical mechanisms. He advocated for placing international liquidity and the coordination of the economic policies of member states at the center of the international monetary system.

From 1946 to 1948, Triffin worked at the Research Department of the IMF, where he studied the problems of post-war European economic reconstruction. In those years, Triffin became an advocate of regional monetary cooperation – which ran counter to the global monetary system envisioned with Bretton Woods. In doing so, Triffin was a staunch supporter of multilateralization of international payments. In 1948, Triffin enrolled in the work of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), and the participated in the OEEC’s Joint Trade and Payments Committee and Intra-European Payments Committee. His ideas for multilateral clearing were important building blocs for the creation of the European Payments Union (EPU) in 1950.