Speaker

Kenneth Rogoff

Kenneth Rogoff

American economist. Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Former chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund (2001–03). Co-author, with Carmen Reinhart, of This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2009), the most-cited empirical study of sovereign debt crises. Author of The Curse of Cash (2016) and Our Dollar, Your Problem (2025).

Rogoff built his reputation across two domains that rarely overlap. As an academic he published foundational work on exchange-rate theory (his 1983 paper on purchasing power parity puzzles remains a touchstone), political business cycles, central bank independence, and sovereign debt. As a practitioner he navigated the IMF through Argentina’s 2001 collapse, Brazil’s near-crisis, and the Asian aftermath. His public-policy positions — particularly his case for eliminating large-denomination banknotes and his warnings about US debt sustainability — have made him a recurring figure in fiscal and monetary debates.

Before economics, Rogoff was a chess grandmaster, representing the United States internationally in the 1960s and 1970s. He analysed with Bobby Fischer at the 1969 US Junior Championship and drew Magnus Carlsen in a 2012 speed chess game.

Core positions

Rogoff’s intellectual signature is a long memory for how crises actually unfold, set against the perennial tendency of markets and policymakers to assume that the current benign regime is permanent. This Time Is Different documented eight centuries of sovereign defaults and financial crises to make that argument empirically; the title is ironic — it never is. His current concerns centre on three linked claims: that US fiscal trajectory is genuinely unsustainable and will resolve through inflation rather than clean adjustment; that real interest rates have normalised upward from post-crisis lows and are unlikely to fall back; and that the post-COVID disinflation, while impressive, consumed the Federal Reserve’s credibility in a way that will make the next inflation cycle harder to contain.

On structural policy he is an advocate for phasing out large-denomination currency, which he views as a subsidy to tax evasion dressed up as monetary tradition, and a sceptic of central-bank digital currencies for the US, which he thinks would concentrate systemic risk unnecessarily when the existing dollar system is already dominant.

In the wiki