The annual Money Macro and Finance conference, was hosted here at Kent with top current and former policymakers and academics speaking about the current global inflation challenges. PhD candidate Joao Pedro De Camargo Mainente was on the organising committee and summarises the three day event for us here.
Last week the Macroeconomics, Growth and History Centre (MaGHiC) had the pleasure of welcoming the Money, Macro and Finance Conference for it’s 53rd edition. The conference gathered over 100 delegates from 85 different academic departments across the world, holding 32 parallel sessions and 3 special sessions throughout its 3 days.
As mentioned on our previous blog post on the conference, the hot topic of this year’s conference was inflation, with two keynote speakers and two special sessions dedicated exclusively to discuss its implications to the world economy and the policy requirements to curb it. By the same token, the topic showed up (even if not always explicitly) in almost all parallel sessions that covered monetary policy issues.
Apart from inflation, the conference boasted a wide range of topics covering – as its own name says – money, Macroeconomics, and Finance topics that would appeal to a very diverse crowd. Personally, some particularly interesting sessions covered Central Bank Digital Currencies, measuring Brexit uncertainty with Machine Learning and productivity.
We were delighted to once again have Professor Jagjit Chadha OBE on campus alongside Paul Tucker, former Deputy Governor of the BoE, and Mervyn King, member of House of Lords and former Governor of the BoE, discussing the lessons learned in the past 25 years of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). The conference was closed with a very interesting and thought-provoking talk from Lewis H. Durland Professor Murillo Campello from Cornell University.
After a long break and numerous online sessions over the past two years, it was truly delightful to see all the conference’s delegates in person, having outside the sessions, sharing their views and experiences of recent times. This was especially the case during the fantastic dinner hosted at the Cathedral Lodge on the second evening of the conference, including a fantastic view of the magnificent Canterbury Cathedral.
‘The conference was a great success.’ Miguel Leon Ledesma, Director of MaGHiC concluded ‘The return to face to face interaction, the quality of keynote and special sessions, the impressive parallel sessions, and spotless organisation all contributed to a really nice, friendly, and academically fruitful event. I am specially grateful to Alfred Duncan, Ilhan Guner, Alex Klein, and Wei Jiang for having worked so hard to make the conference a success.’
We also had the opportunity and pleasure to welcome one of the local organizers for next year’s edition of the MMFC, to be held at the University of Portsmouth. We are already looking forward to it!