He enlarged the International Monetary Fund’s role as a manager of the global economy.
By Harrison Smith Harrison Smith Obituary writer Email Bio Follow May 1 at 6:50 PM H. Johannes Witteveen, a Dutch economist and politician who navigated a whirlwind of financial turbulence as the head of the International Monetary Fund from 1973 to 1978, all while enlarging the fund’s role as a lender and manager of the global economy, died April 23. He was 97.
In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, oil prices exploded, eventually quadrupling — exacerbating a period of global recession and inflation dubbed “stagflation.” For the first time since the Depression, each of the world’s major economies was in a recession at the same time. Dr. Witteveen chats with Margaret Thatcher, leader of Britain's Conservative Party, during a 1975 meeting in his Washington office. Dr. Witteveen negotiated the loan packages himself, drawing on his political experience in the Netherlands.
Dr. Witteveen, compromising between nations that favored fixed rate and floating currency exchanges, negotiated an arrangement in which the fund could exercise “firm surveillance” over the exchange rate policies of its member countries. Upon his retirement, the Economist magazine likened the IMF to a phoenix, saying that it had “risen from the ashes of fixed exchange rates and quadrupled oil prices, with its claim intact to be the overseer of those parts of the world’s monetary system that the world allows it to oversee.”
Dr. Witteveen studied at the Netherlands School of Economics under Jan Tinbergen, who was later awarded the first Nobel Prize in economics. He received a doctorate in 1947 and worked as a government economist and a professor at his alma mater, launching his political career when he entered the Senate in 1958.
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