On the afternoon of Nov.19th, Mr. William R. Rhodes, President and CEO of William R. Rhodes Global Advisors, the former senior vice chairman of Citigroup and Citibank, and the professor-at-large at Brown University, visited Langrun Garden and delivered a speech entitled Leadership Lessons from the Front Lines of Global Finance. Dr. John Yang, Dean of BiMBA, attended and hosted the event.
Recalling the beautiful memory of visiting Peking University seven years ago, Mr. Rhodes expressed his excitement on the second trip to the most prestigious university in China. Then he shifted to share his insight on the European debt crisis based on his rich experience on coping with financial crisis worldwide.
Mr. Rhodes criticized European leaders’ inappropriate policies on the debt crisis. Due to specific physical environment and financial structures, different countries have their own reasons to get into the crisis that accordingly would request different measures and policies for recovery. But European leaders were trying to apply same measures to all problems in these countries in the past three years, which dragged the global economy down.
Europe can solve its debt crisis by “learning lessons from the previous debt crisis like Latin American debt crisis, Asian Financial Crisis and others”, Mr. Rhodes suggested. Early in 2010, Mr. Rhodes warned European leaders that EU would experience a debt crisis similar to those in Latin America and Asia, and they should try to prevent the crisis from spreading to the Southern European. But European leaders refused arrogantly since lessons from developing countries wouldn’t be benefit much for developed EU.
He continued to urge for solving the crisis as soon as possible since today’s world markets are more interconnected than ever before. Especially for China which is the largest trading partner of Europe Union, solving the crisis will help to boost the economy in China and all over the world. Mr. Rhodes proposed multiple-dimension measures as the solution. Specifically, he called for a timeline to force these countries to take measures and earn the trust from markets and people back. In addition, a bank union is also necessary to coordinate and regulate the process and further incentive.
Along with the urgency to solve the crisis, Mr. Rhodes emphasized on the importance of excellent leadership, no matter to a person, a company or even a country. He cited three examples, Brazil, South Korean and Turkey, to demonstrate the role of leadership in handling the economic crisis. Particularly, he praised Kim Dae-jung, the ex-president of the Republic of Korea for supporting the bank restructure and making successful reforms recommended by the International Monetary Fund during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, despite his political and historic prejudice about the IMF. With the strong leadership, Kim Dae-jung successfully got the economy recovered in a rapid speed which is rarely seen in history.
After an hour of sharing his vision on international financial crisis, he kindly answered questions of the audience.
When asked about his opinion about Chinese currency exchange rate, he was quite optimistic and said, "What we are going to see over the next decades of years is a more easing interest rate, and more open financial system. And eventually you will see a fully convertible yuan". He also comment on the fiscal cliff of US which most BiMBA students cared about a lot, saying that US would solve the problem by cutting the expenses and increasing the revenue. And probably the concrete plan would come out within a month, he predicted.
In the Q&A session, Mr. Rhodes enthusiastically encouraged BiMBA students to take the opportunity to practice and develop their leadership skills and he would be more than happy to see more and more financial talents from China in the world stage. He then gave each student one copy of his newly published biography –Banker to the World as gift.
At the end of the lecture, Dr. Yang, on behalf of BiMBA, thanked the guest with BiMBA souvenir for his splendid speech.
