Steve H. Hanke is an American applied economist at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. He is also a Senior Fellow and Director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise in Baltimore, MD, a Distinguished Professor at the Universitas Pelita Harapan in Jakarta, Indonesia; a member of the National Bank of Kuwait’s International Advisory Board (chaired by Sir John Major); a member of the Financial Advisory Council of the United Arab Emirates; and a columnist at Forbes magazine.
In the past, Prof. Hanke taught economics at the Colorado School of Mines and the University of California at Berkeley. He served as a Senior Economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1981-82; as a State Counselor to the Republic of Lithuania in 1994-1996 and to the Republic of Montenegro in 1999-2003; and as an Advisor to the Presidents of Bulgaria in 1997-2002, Venezuela in 1995-96 and Indonesia in 1998. He played an important role in establishing new currency regimes in Argentina, Estonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ecuador, Lithuania and Montenegro. He has also advised the governments of many other countries, including Albania, Kazakhstan and Yugoslavia. In 1998, he was named one of the twenty-five most influential people in the world by World Trade Magazine.
Prof. Hanke is a well-known currency and commodity trader. He is Chairman Emeritus of the Friedberg Mercantile Group, Inc. in Toronto. During the 1990s, he served as President of Toronto Trust Argentina in Buenos Aires, the world’s best-performing emerging market mutual fund in 1995.
Hanke has received various honors in recognition of his scholarship on exchange rate regimes and his currency reform efforts.
Hanke began writing his “Point of View” column for Forbes magazine in 1997, continuing to do so through 2010. Initially, the column was co-authored with Sir Alan Walters. Hanke was also a contributing editor for Forbes Asia magazine. In 2007, Hanke became a contributing editor for Globe Asia, where he continues to write a monthly column covering a wide range of topics in international economics. He is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, Business Insider and Gulf News.
Prof. Hanke’s wrote “Zimbabwe: Hyperinflation to Growth”.