Carmen Reinhart

Carmen M. Reinhart (née Castellanos, born October 7, 1955) is a Cuban-American economist and the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School.

Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland.

She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations.

She is also a member of American Economic Association, Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, and the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

She became the subject of general news coverage when mathematical errors were found in a research paper she co-authored.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Reinhart arrived in the United States on January 6, 1966, at the age of 10, with her mother and father and three suitcases.

They settled in Pasadena, California, during the early years before moving to South Florida, where she grew up.

When the family moved to Miami, Reinhart started college at two-year Miami Dade College, before transferring to Florida International University, where she received a B.A. in Economics (summa cum laude) in 1975.

Recommended by Peter Montiel, an M.I.T. graduate teaching at FIU, Reinhart in 1978 went on to attend Columbia University graduate school.

After Reinhart passed her field examinations, she was hired as an economist by Bear Stearns and rose to the investment bank's chief economist three years later.

After her B.A., Reinhart worked for her master's degree in Philosophy, eventually receiving this degree in 1981 from Columbia University.

Even the serious recession of 1982, which Blinder states "was called the Great Recession in its day", fits comfortably within this category of a typical recession, which will respond to the standard tools.

A few years down the road, Reinhart also received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1988.

In 1988 she returned to Columbia to obtain her Ph.D. under the supervision of Robert Mundell.

In the 1990s, she held several positions in the International Monetary Fund.

In a normal recession such as 1991 or 2000, the Keynesian tools of tax cuts and infrastructure spending (fiscal stimulus), and lowered interest rates (monetary stimulus), will usually right the economic ship in a matter of months and lead to recovery and economic expansion.

From 2001 to 2003, she returned to the International Monetary Fund as deputy director at the Research Department.

Fellow economist Alan Blinder credits both Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff with describing highly relevant aspects of the 2008 financial institution near-meltdown and resulting serious recession.

By contrast, the 2008 near-meltdown destroyed parts of the financial system and left other parts reeling and in serious need of de-leveraging.

Large amounts of governmental debt, household debt, corporate debt, and financial institution debt were left in its wake.

And because of this debt, the normal tools of tax cuts and increased infrastructure spending were somewhat less available and/or politically difficult to achieve.

Indeed, economist Paul Krugman argued that even the combination of the Oct. 2008 bailout plus the Feb. 2009 bailout did not go big enough, although Blinder states that they were large compared to previous bailouts.

Moreover, since interest rates were already near zero, the standard monetary tool of lowering rates was not going to provide much help.

Recovery from what Blinder terms a Reinhart-Rogoff recession may require debt forgiveness, either directly or implicitly, by encouraging somewhat higher than normal rates of inflation.

In both 2011 and 2012, she was included in the 50 Most Influential ranking of Bloomberg Markets.

Outside of Reinhart's professional activities, she has received compensation for conference-related and speaking engagements, advisory boards, as well as writing and royalties.

In the June 2023 Graduation Ceremonies at University of St Andrews, Reinhart was awarded Doctor of Laws (LLD), in recognition of her major contribution to economics.

She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance, including: international capital flows, capital controls, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion.

Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as The American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Her work is featured in the financial press, including The Economist, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Her book (with Kenneth Rogoff), This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, studied the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history.

Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises in both advanced economies and emerging markets.

It has been translated to over 20 languages and won the Paul A. Samuelson Award, among others.

She has been the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School since 2012.

She has served on the editorial boards of The American Economic Review, the Journal of International Economics, International Journal of Central Banking, among others.

In 2013, Reinhart and Rogoff were in the spotlight after researchers discovered that their 2010 paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" in The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings had methodological and computational errors.

She also has written monthly columns for international media organization Project Syndicate since 2014.

She has testified before Congress and is listed among Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, Thomson Reuters' The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds, and Bloomberg Markets Most Influential 50 in Finance. In December 2018, Reinhart received the King Juan Carlos Prize in Economics and Nabe's Adam Smith Award.

On May 20, 2020, Reinhart was appointed World Bank Chief Economist, starting on June 15, 2020.

According to Research Papers in Economics (RePec), Reinhart is ranked among the top economists worldwide, based on publications and scholarly citations.