Book launch: Three Central Bankers and History of Banco de la República, 1923-2015

The book launch of Three Central Bankers and History of Banco de la República, 1923-2015, presented by Carlos Caballero Argaez and Eduardo Wiesner, will take place on Tuesday, October 24 at 5:00 p.m., at the Gun Club in Bogotá (Calle 82 #7-77). Members of the Board of Directors of the Central Bank of Colombia and well-known personalities of national economic life will attend the event.

Three Central Bankers

This publication was written by Roberto Steiner, Leonardo Villar, and Salomón Kalmanovitz, and was edited by Adolfo Meisel (member of the Board of Directors) and Maria Teresa Ramirez (main researcher at the Central Bank). It presents the professional profiles and some personality traits of the last three Governors of Banco de la República: Francisco Ortega, Miguel Urrutia, and Jose Darío Uribe. These three Governors stand out for their long history at the institution, their professional prestige, and their recognition by the Colombian society, and also abroad. Their solid leadership has been an important asset to the prestige of the Central Bank—one of the most influential economic institutions in Colombia in the last century—since its foundation in 1923.

The reason for selecting these three Governors is their role in a new stage of the history of the Central Bank, namely, the one characterized by the autonomy granted to it by the Constitution of 1991. Also, thanks to their very long and recent career at the Central Bank, many people are familiar with their performances and way of thinking. This wealth of first-hand information served to build their profiles. Although doing something similar with the first Governors of the institution would be difficult, the information available reveals that they all share common features worth of being highlighted and discussed in detail: their long association with the institution, their professional and personal prestige, the great experience they had when they arrived at the position, and their extensive stay at it.

History of Banco de la República, 1923-2015

This book was written jointly by Adolfo Meisel, Fabio Sánchez, Juan Guillermo Bedoya, Juliana Jaramillo, Javier Gómez, Antonio Hernández, Alberto Boada, Carolina Gómez, Marcela Ocampo, Rudolf Hommes, Jose Elías Melo, Gerardo Hernández, José Eduardo Gómez, Camila Gamba, David Pérez, Hernando Vargas, Enrique Lopez, Norberto Rodriguez, Miguel Urrutia, and Roberto Junguito, and it was edited by José Darío Uribe, former Governor of the Central Bank.

For the second time in almost one-hundred years, a group of experts examines the institutional life and the economic environment of the monetary, exchange, and credit policy. The first publication in this line was El Banco de la República: antecedentes, evolución y estructura, in 1990. This volume, which remains very useful, focused on the legal and institutional aspects of Colombian central banking, and came out at a time when our economic and political institutions were about to experience the greatest transformation of that century as a result of the Constitution of 1991.

This new history of the Central Bank goes beyond the first work, not only regarding the chronological information, as is evident, but also because it broadens the approach of the first analysis. For instance, it examines in detail the theoretical and ideological background underlying the decisions of the monetary authority in every stage of the Bank, describing—briefly but thoroughly—the most determining economic forces in each of the major periods. Its purpose is to depict the context for the decisions reached by Banco de la República and the theoretical principles that supported them at each stage, as well as the restrictions that conditioned those decisions from the political and institutional points of view.

The PDF version of these books can be downloaded freely at www.banrep.gov.co/libros. The EPUB will be available by the end of this year in our digital libraries.