1. Heiner Flassbeck became the Chief of Macroeconomics and Development of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva in January 2003, a position that he held until resigning at the end of 2012 due to his age.
13 Facts About Heiner Flassbeck
1. 2.
Heiner Flassbeck counseled the former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine with his intent to establish together with French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn a Keynesian fiscal policy and monetary policy on level of the European Union and to reform the international monetary system.
3.
Heiner Flassbeck explained his positions on economic policy together with economist Frederike Spiecker in their book The End of Mass Unemployment.
4.
Heiner Flassbeck put the economic crisis down to a structure-conservative policy which focused on individual economic particular interests, with what the market economy in the end was questioned.
5.
Heiner Flassbeck assigns a major role to the insight that a national economy cannot save: the common understanding that a national economy could gain net savings, thus saving money during a certain period of time to finance investment in a future period using saved money, was false.
6.
Heiner Flassbeck sees the need for a coordination of monetary policy, wage policy and fiscal policy.
7.
Heiner Flassbeck assigns monetary policy an outstanding impact on growth and employment and refuses its shortening on retaining price stability.
8.
Heiner Flassbeck declares monetarism failed to control inflation through money supply.
9.
Heiner Flassbeck emphasises the speciality of the German and European monetary policy, which, contrary to the majority of central banks, retained monetarism.
10.
Heiner Flassbeck cites that the monetary policy of the German Bundesbank and the European Central Bank to control the money supply ever geared to the potential output of the past.
11.
Heiner Flassbeck considers the target inflation rate of the ECB to be too low and refers to the height at other major central banks.
12.
Furthermore, Heiner Flassbeck compares the German economy growth in the years of the "Wirtschaftswunder" with other countries and concludes that West German growth rates were only slightly higher than those of France and Italy in the 1950s, but that already in the 1960s, it was slower than the average of those countries.
13.
In media Heiner Flassbeck frequently holds his views on economic policy and theory, which in part are in favour of Keynesianism and particularly Joseph Schumpeter and Wilhelm Lautenbach.