Bob Mundell

Personal remembrances of time with an interesting and generous man

This is a personal salute to Bob Mundell, who passed away yesterday. Bob was a good friend, who had a material impact on my life, as he had done for many others. He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on open-economy macroeconomics and he developed the monetary approach to the balance of payments and the theory of optimal currency areas. He was the principal intellectual inspiration for both the Euro and much of Reaganomics.

My Mundell adventures began in China in 2004. Both of my parents had recently passed away and I was in a brain funk, looking for something to do that would make a difference to the world. I was convinced that the most important question for my five children’s future was whether the US and China ended up as friends or foes. I wanted to do something to help both peoples get to know each other better but had no idea how to get involved. I learned that Bob had recently founded a business school in Beijing, the Mundell International School of Entrepreneurship and let him know that I was looking for a way to be useful.

Being a generous man Bob said sure, come to Beijing and be the Dean of MIUE. Not long after that I met Bob in Beijing and got my first of many certificates (above) with two red chop marks. Nice, right?

Bob was already very famous in China and knew all, and I mean all, of the senior leaders in government, in finance, and in the universities. Traveling as his wingman, I got to meet all of them, for which I will always be grateful.

One of our first trips was to Shenyang where he introduced me to a serious-looking man named Li Keqiang, who was Party Secretary for Liaoning Province. “My friends tell me he is a leading candidate to be Premier one day,” Bob told me. Today he is Premier of the People’s Republic of China. Bob was like that.

That same day, we toured the new BMW factory in Shenyang. (We got to wear blue coats and everything!) I remember that the factory manager, Eberhard Schrempf, told us that 75% of the people working on the assembly line had engineering degrees. I remember thinking “Ruh-Roh, these guys are going to be hard to compete with.”

Over the next dozen years I enjoyed some one hundred trips to China doing all sorts of interesting things. I became an Honorary Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a dozen other universities where I had the opportunity to meet with countless students. I spoke at economic and financial forums (at one of them I met an energetic young entrepreneur named Jack Ma who had started a company named Alibaba). I was invited to be Chief Financial Advisor to the Governor of Haidian, the district in Beijing where all of the major universities are located and half of China’s venture capital is invested. And I was given the Great Wall Friendship Award by Wang Qishan (then Governor of Beijing, now Vice President of China). None of it would have happened without Bob’s endorsement. Like I said, Bob was a generous man.

Of all the pictures I have of Bob, the one I treasure most was taken on a warm and sunny afternoon at his palazzo in Siena during a coffee break at the conference he held there every summer where friends discussed economic issues.

Thank you for indulging a few of my personal remembrances of an interesting and generous man. He had an impact on my life and on the lives of the many others he touched. There won’t be another like him.

Dr. John