Warren Coats and John Tamny Debate: Who Needs the Fed?

Warren Coats retired from the International Monetary Fund in 2003 as Assistant Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, where he led technical assistance missions to more than twenty countries, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Egypt, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. He served as visiting economist to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and to the World Bank, and was Assistant Prof of Economics at UVa from 1970-75. He was chief of the Operations Division for SDRs in the Finance Department from 1982 – 198 and was a director of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority 2003 - 2010. His most recent book, One Currency for Bosnia: Creating the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina, chronicles his experience in setting up the new central bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has a BA from UC Berkeley, and PhD from U. of Chicago both in Economics. Milton Friedman was the chairman of his doctoral dissertation committee. He was part of the IMF’s program team for Afghanistan from 2010 to end 2013 and has been member of the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review since 2010. John Tamny is Political Economy editor at Forbes, a senior fellow in economics at Reason Foundation, a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research & Trading, and editor of RealClearMarkets.com (RCM). A spin-off of the policy website RealClearPolitics, RCM seeks to compile top-quality information and opinion about the stock markets and global economy. Mr. Tamny frequently writes about the securities markets, along with tax, trade and monetary policy issues that impact those markets for a variety of publications including the Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, Financial Times, National Review and London’s Daily Telegraph. He's the author of Who Needs the Fed? (Encounter Books, 2016), along with Popular Economics (Regnery, 2015). He’s a weekly guest on Forbes on Fox. Prior to his present work, John worked in private wealth management for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. He received a BA in Government from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA from Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management. He lives in Washington, D.C. Filmed and Edited by Ford Fischer