Bernard Lietaer

Bernard Lietaer (born in 1942 in Lauwe, Belgium) is an economist and author. 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 "" (London: Random House, 2001) and the forthcoming "Of Human Wealth," has been active in the realm of money systems for over 25 years in a wide variety of functions. 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. [cite web | url = http://www.lietaer.com/home/detailedbio.html | title = Bernard A. Lietaer Professional Background | accessdate = 2007-12-26 | year = 2006 His own biography and curriculum vitae, which cites the Micropal survey of 1,800 off-shore funds. In the preface to [http://www.transaction.net/money/book/rethink2b.html "The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity"] Lietaer writes: "We almost tripled the money in three years".] Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992. [cite web | url = http://www.mediatorsfoundation.org/relatedreading/LIG_Bios_Pub.pdf | title = ABOUT THE GLOBAL LEADERSHIP NETWORK, page 353]

Lietaer currently lives in Boulder, Colorado and teaches at the Marpa Center for Business and Economics at Naropa University. 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.

He is the originator of a complementary currency called the "Terra".

External links

* [http://www.nexuspub.com/articles/2003/july2003/interview.htm An interview with Bernard Lietaer]
* [http://www.transaction.net/money/cc/cc01.html Community Currencies: A New Tool for the 21st Century]
* [http://www.futurenet.org/article.asp?id=886 Another interview with Bernard Lietaer]
* [http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/8/26/172939/637 A discussion about these interviews]
* [http://www.transaction.net/money/book/index.html Excerpts from his book, "The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World"]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjYDhuLWUnE (video) Bernard Lietaer for an NHK Japan documentary on complementary currency systems] and Silvio Gesell
* [http://www.lietaer.com/images/BIO.pdf Short biography]

Notes