The Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the presentation of the book "A Surprising Economic Crisis 2007-2012" on 5 February 2013.
The event was presented by Pedro Schwartz, Professor Extraordinary of the Universidad San Pablo and will be attended by the authors of the book, Juan E. Castañeda, Professor of Economics. University of Buckingham and José Antonio de Aguirre Rodríguez, economist.
The authors of the book argue that "The crisis in the richest and most advanced countries caught our banks, government regulators and most economists and financial experts by surprise. They are all bewildered as to how to put an end to all this suffering. We simply propose a humbling cure. If you ask those in commerce, industry, business or among ordinary citizens, they will probably tell you that the more money and cheap credit the better. But this is what we had in the years before the crisis. We too are surprised economists and more so as events unfold. We have asked our central banks for what they cannot give us and in the task they have neglected what was always their primary mission, to prevent our credit system from collapsing because if it does it will take years to recover. We now need more humility with less arrogance and intellectual laziness than we have exhibited in the years before the crisis".
José Antonio de Aguirre, after a brief stint in the world of university teaching, has spent his entire career as a professional economist, first in the service of the Ministry of Finance and later in the Bilbao, Barcelona and Madrid Stock Exchanges. In the 1980s he played a leading role in the introduction in Spain of the theories of James Buchanan and his school, facilitating the translation into Spanish of some of the basic works of his doctrinal approach, such as El cálculo del consenso, El poder fiscal and La razón de las normas. The result of this collaboration is his book on The Power to Issue Money (1985). In the 1990s he founded the Biblioteca de Grandes Economistas del Siglo Veinte, which incorporated into Spanish the basic works of Böhm-Bawerk, Wicksell, Hayek and Fisher, as well as a critical edition of John Maynard Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. His latest book, El Capitalismo y la Riqueza de las Naciones, is the fruit of his long dedication to the study of the work of these great thinkers and of his own professional experience.
Juan E. D. in Economics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1997 and 2003, respectively. His doctoral thesis, which focused on the analysis of the monetary strategy of the European Central Bank, received the runner-up prize of the IEE's Víctor Mendoza Award. He was a lecturer at UNED from 1998 to 2012 and a visiting researcher at Cass Business School (City London University, London) during the 2004-2005 academic year. He has also carried out research work for the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Bank of Spain, through the award of several research projects.
He has specialised in the study of central banks and their monetary policy rules. He contributed to the quarterly reports of the so-called "monetary dialogue" between the European Parliament and the ECB between 2007 and 2008. He has also written for the daily newspaper Expansión since 2011 and publishes articles on currency and central banking in the online newspapers Oro y Finanzas and Gold Money. Since July 2012 he has been Professor of Economics at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom.
