Jurgen Stark, the chief economist of ECB (read his profile), has a nice speech on the topic. Most of it is well-known. But a useful summary of the issues.
Regarding the hot-topic whether central banks should intervene in asset markets or not, he says we need to look at it actively now. There is a need to look at ECB’s monetary pillar analysis more closely. The monetary and credit aspects of the economy ignored by other central banks, need to become a prominent tool for central bankers.
Foreign Policy has put up a list of Top 100 global thinkers. Quite a few economists feature in it. I have tried to categorise them:
Central Bank Governor/ Economists
1. Ben Bernanke – for staving off a new Great Depression
9. Zhou Xiaochuan – for reminding the world that we can’t take the dollar for granted.
Academia Economists
4. Nouriel Roubini – for accurately forecasting the global financial pandemic.
7. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler – for taking behavioralism from niche to necessary.
14. Larry Summers – for being the brains behind Obama’s economic policy
15. Martin Wolf – for being the dean of financial columnists.
22. Robert Shiller – for warning us — over and over — about dangerous bubbles
25. Joseph Stiglitz – for relentlessly questioning economic dogma.
29. Paul Krugman - for proving that a Nobel Prize winner can also be a prolific pundit and unerringly correct doomsayer.
35. Nicholas Stern- for figuring out the costs of climate change and the politics of a solution.
36. Paul Collier- for showing how the world’s bad guys are keeping the bottom billion down.
39. Jeffrey D. Sachs- for being the global poor’s most persistent advocate among the global elite.
39. William Easterly -for raising inconvenient truths about the foreign-aid business.
41. Esther Duflo – for adding quantitative rigor to assessments of foreign aid.
58. Amartya Sen- for showing how democracy prevents famine
91. Willem Buiter – for his maverick commentary on the financial crisis.
99. Emily Oster – for her creative research into what really helps the poor
Thinktank Economists
5. Rajendra Pachauri -for ending the debate over whether climate change matters.
33. Robert Zoellick and Dominique Strauss-Kahn – for using the crisis in service of a good cause: helping the world’s poor.
Non-economists contributing to economics (Most of them have studied economics but don’t really work as an economist)
16. Mohamed El-Erian – for his unparalleled knowledge of global finance.
28. Elinor Ostrom- for showing us that the global commons isn’t such a tragic place after all.
38. George Soros – for showing us that billionaires can be thinkers, too
42. Jared Diamond- for helping us understand how societies not only grow, but die.
43. Richard Posner -for his wide-ranging intellectual contributions.
46. Muhammad Yunus- for proving that the poor are profitable.
56. Niall Ferguson – for his intelligent, incessant questioning of dogma
65. Francis Fukuyama – for creating a foreign-policy paradigm that has defined almost two decades of argument.
74. Gordon Brown – for his leadership during the financial crisis.
88. Sunita Narain – for giving voice to India’s environmental conscience
Phew..that is quite a list really. I may have missed a few as well.
It could easily be a list of top economics thinkers as well. It surely is a result of the ongoing financial crisis. It is a financial economics heavy and environmental economics heavy list.
