An American Globalist

Positionan Advisor in the IMF's Research Department.

People in Economics

WHAT do Woody Allen, Miles Davis, Julia Child, and C. Fred Bergsten have in common? Not an easy one. Time’s up. The answer is that they are all U.S. citizens who’ve been awarded France’s Legion of Honor for their contributions to society and global discourse. Well, the French love Woody, and they love jazz, and of course they love their food. But what is Fred Bergsten’s contribution? And (yes, you can ask now) who is Bergsten?

While other recipients of the Legion of Honor are often globe-trotters, Bergsten has conducted his life’s work from within the Beltway, the nickname for the highway that surrounds Washington, D.C. Here, in 1981, Bergsten founded—and still heads—probably the world’s most influential think tank on international economics, the Peterson Institute. This follows a distinguished career in the U.S. government, first in the Nixon administration at the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger—who says Bergsten taught him “everything I know about economics.” Later, Bergsten was the U.S. Treasury’s top gun for international economics under President Carter during the tumultuous time of the energy crisis. He recently announced that he will step down as director of the Peterson Institute at the end of 2012.

Bergsten’s life has been devoted to putting global considerations into the minds of often-parochial U.S. policymakers and to furthering global economic integration. These efforts have gained him plaudits abroad, such as the Legion of Honor from France and an honorary fellowship in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has been a fervent supporter of the euro and—because he thinks it will unleash protectionism and hurt global integration—a vehement critic of what he considers to be the undervalued renminbi. The late Michael Mussa—IMF chief economist from 1991 to 2001 and later a senior fellow at Peterson—described Bergsten as “an evangelist for the open economy.”

Evangelical roots

It is an evangelism that would have been difficult to predict from Bergsten’s roots. He grew up on New York’s Long Island in the suburb of Amityville (known to many Americans from the popular Amityville Horror book and movies) and then moved to Farmington, Missouri, which he says “is kind of like the name sounds . . . in the middle of a basically rural area.” In both places, basketball competed with academics for the top spot in the young Bergsten’s mind; it is a sport in which he remains active to this day.

How did this all-American experience lead to a love of international affairs? Bergsten credits a trip he took with his parents to England in the summer of 1951, when he was 10. His father, a Methodist minister, had been involved in the church’s global ministries and took an exchange pastorate in England. “London was still largely bombed out,” says Bergsten. There was rationing from which foreigners like his family were exempt. “So I got an introduction to a foreign environment, plus a kind of taste of repercussions still from the war . . . And I think that was really what got me started down that path.”

Bergsten did his undergraduate studies at Central Methodist University in Fayette, Missouri, which both his parents had attended. In his junior year, he got “heavily into political science, history, and debate . . . anything tied to political stuff.” That summer, he traveled with a group from his college to Austria and Germany. On the way over on the ship, he noticed that a seminar on international affairs was being held every day on the deck. Bergsten says...

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