Rolf Kullberg
Rolf Kullberg (central banker) | ||||||||||||
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Born | 3 October 1930 Pojo, Finland | |||||||||||
Died | 3 September 2007 (Age 76) Helsinki, Finland | |||||||||||
Nationality | Finnish | |||||||||||
Alma mater | Åbo Akademi University | |||||||||||
Governor of the Bank of Finland responsible the country's worst recession in the early 1990s.
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Rolf Evert Kullberg was the Governor of the Bank of Finland from 1983 to 1992.[1] He was a member of the board since 1974.
Education
Kullberg had a master's degree in political science from the Swedish-speaking Åbo Akademi in 1955. He worked, among other things, at Fiskars, the bank Yhdyspanki, and as department head of the National Economy Department of the Ministry of Finance in 1971–1972. He already did his licentiate work on the development of money markets in the 1950s. At Yhydispanki, he was responsible for, among other things, financial research.
Governor of Bank of Finland
In 1974, Kullberg was appointed a member of the board of the Bank of Finland. In May 1983, President Mauno Koivisto appointed Kullberg as the bank's CEO to replace Ahti Karjalainen, who had been fired.
At the end of his term as a governor Finland experienced its worst recession. Before the recession there was a long period of growth and it was easy to borrow money. Kullberg was one of the first persons to publicly warn about the possible risks. He warned that people and companies are borrowing more than they can afford. But Kullberg was also (in addition to Mauno Koivisto and Harri Holker, for example) one of the culprits of the recession. Economist Jaakko Kiander has considered the liberalization of currency trade to be the most important underlying cause of the recession.[2]
During those hard times the main goal of the Bank of Finland was to maintain stable currency rate. Kullberg tied the currency rate of Finland's markka to ECU currency in 1991 in order to gain more stability. But finally Finland was forced to devaluate and eventually let its currency float in 1992. This was a serious setback to Kullberg and he wanted to resign from his post. However, the president of Finland Mauno Koivisto asked him to continue. In the April 1992 he made an early retirement after publicly disagreeing with the prime minister Esko Aho about financial politics.
He died 3 September 2007 at the age of 76 after a serious illness.[3]
References
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