Looking backward, selected assignments and contacts in my career
appear as being crucial to this work, Central Banking, Crises, and
Global Economy. These include some early assignments at the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York--first, reporting on the capital markets, and then at
the London desk. My book (with William Yohe), The Analytics and Institutions
of Money and Banking ( 1966), was an outgrowth of these assignments and my
1959-60 faculty fellowship in mathematics at Harvard.

After two decades the interest in London resurfaced as Margaret Thatcher
gained political visibility of global proportions. In this period my contacts with
Roger Alford at the London School of Economics (LSE) were quite supportive of
my research efforts, as were those with C. T. Taylor at the Bank of England in
the early 1990s. During this London period I also had the support of the
Americans Charles Wellborn and Eugene Crook at Florida's London Study
Center. Extended stays in London made possible contacts with the Bundesbank
representative at the German Embassy, as well as study and observations of
London's highly developed foreign exchange markets, which had grown
dramatically in the period following Richard Nixon's decision to close the U.S.
gold window, to devalue the dollar in two steps, and then to allow it to float.

Overall, during my tenure at the University of Florida, I had a number of
students with interests in Latin America as well as others from Latin America.
The University's Latin American Studies program attracted many of these, plus,
perhaps surprisingly, there is a Milton Friedman connection there via Chile also.

Next, following upon early interest in Asia and coinciding with the 1997-98
Asian debt and liquidity crises, was the opportunity to participate in the Milken
Institute's Global Economic Conference ( Los Angeles, March 11-13, 1998). As
influenced by Michael Milken, the Institute's chairman, the conference's theme
was the increasingly interconnected nations of the world. In combination with
my central banking and monetary interests, Milken's theme became the theme of

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