MONETARY AND BANKING CONFERENCE 2024
Fiscal Deficits, Monetary Policy, and Inflation
SPEAKERS
Santiago Bausili
Santiago Bausili is president of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic. He has a degree in Economics from the University of San Andrés.
His professional training was developed in international banking, where he worked 11 years for J.P. Morgan and 9 years for Deutsche Bank. He lived 17 years in New York working for these institutions. He was responsible for financing in the international capital market for private sector companies and governments in Latin America.
the design of strategies to hedge financial risks through derivative instruments, and the structuring of private financing. Although he participated in transactions involving clients from most Latin American countries, he had greater exposure and focus on the Andean countries of the region and the Southern Cone.
Before assuming his current position at the Central Bank, he held other positions in the public sector: he was Secretary of Finance in the Ministry of Finance / Ministry of Finance of the Nation between 2017 and 2019 and Undersecretary of Financing in the Ministry of Finance and Public Finance in 2016.
He also worked as a consultant on macroeconomic and financial issues particularly focusing on the Argentine context (2020-2023).
Neel Kashkari
Neel Kashkari has been President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since January 1, 2016 and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), where he participates in the monetary policy debate taking place in Washington, D.C., providing the vision of the Ninth Federal Reserve District.
In addition, he oversees the operations of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and directs its many initiatives. He was instrumental in the creation of the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute, which aims to ensure that excellent research improves the economic well-being of all Americans.
Most recently, he supported the expansion of the Center for Indian Country Development, which promotes the prosperity of Native Nations and indigenous communities through practical data and research.
He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering, both degrees from the University of Illinois. He dedicated himself to aerospace engineering and developed technology for NASA missions. In the area of finance and public policy, he earned an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He joined Goldman Sachs and served in various senior positions within the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he oversaw the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis.
Pablo Hernández de Cos
Pablo Hernández de Cos has been governor of the Bank of Spain and continues to chair the Technical Advisory Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board. As Governor of the Bank of Spain between June 2018 and June 2024, he has also been a member of the Governing Council and the General Council of the ECB, as well as Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and of the Governing Board of the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA). He has also served on several European and international committees, including the ESRB, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as well as Vice-Chair of the Macroprudential Authority Financial Stability Board (AMCESFI) of Spain.
He holds a PhD in Economics from the Complutense University of Madrid, a degree in Economics and Business Administration from CUNEF and a degree in Law from the UNED.
Ricardo Héctor Arriazu
Ricardo Héctor Arriazu is an Argentine economist with vast international experience. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Universities of Tucumán, Cuyo and Minnesota. He received the title of doctor honoris causa from the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa (UADE).
He is professor emeritus at the Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) and is an honorary member of the Institute of Economics of the National University of Tucumán. He was distinguished by the Estirpe Foundation, by the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the National University of Tucumán, by the Tucumán Foundation and by the Rotary Club for his professional career. He lectured in numerous countries of the world and prestigious universities such as Harvard, Chicago, John Hopkins, Bocconi, Latin American Institute of the Chinese National Academy of Social Sciences, etc
Gustavo Cañonero
Gustavo Cañonero is currently president and portfolio manager at Fundcorp of the CMF Group. He joined the CMF Group in July 2021. From June 2018 to December 2019 he was Vice President of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic. Previously, he was a partner and director at SBS Fondos, managing director and head of Emerging Markets Research at Deutsche Bank (for 20 years), chief economist for Latin America at Salomon Brothers, and economist at the International Monetary Fund.
Cañonero holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master’s degree in Economic Theory from the Institute of Economic and Social Development (IDES-Argentina), and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires.
Rafael Di Tella
Rafael Di Tella is the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the area of Business, Government and International Economics.
He has conducted research in the area of Political Economy, in particular on the role of institutions in the economic performance of a country. Part of his work has studied the control of criminal activity in general and corruption in particular. He has also investigated how data on people’s happiness can be used to compare inflation and unemployment when making macroeconomic decisions. His work in these areas has been published primarily in academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. His latest works investigate the relationship between psychology, beliefs and economic policy.
Ivan Werning
Iván Werning is an Argentine economist. His areas of research interest include macroeconomics, international economics, and public finance.
Gustavo Franco
Gustavo H. B. Franco (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1982) served as Deputy Director of International Affairs (1993-1997) and as President of the Central Bank of Brazil (1997-1999) with a leading role in the elaboration and implementation of the Real Plan.
Subsequently, he has worked in various private sector companies, such as Rio Bravo, Nubank, Multiplan and Daycoval. He has been a professor at the Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro since 1986. He wrote eighteen books and is a columnist for the newspapers O Globo, O Estado de São Paulo and the magazine Exame.
Leonardo Leiderman
Leonardo Leiderman is Professor Emeritus at the Berglas Faculty of Economics and Visiting Professor at the Coller Faculty of Management, Tel-Aviv University. He serves as Chief Economist Advisor to Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s largest commercial bank, and a strategic advisor at Awz Ventures.
In addition, he held a number of senior positions, including Managing Director and Head of Emerging Market Economics at Deutsche Bank, with headquarters in New York and London (2000-2002), and Senior Director and Head of the Research Department at Bank of Israel (1996-2000). Advised the governor and monetary department of the Bank of Israel (1992-1996); and was chairman of the Department of Economics at Tel-Aviv University (1988-1991).
Likewise, throughout those years, he held the positions of visiting professor/fellow in multiple institutions; University of Chicago, Boston University, Abu Dhabi School of Management, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.
He also provided professional advice to various central banks, such as those of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Turkey and Georgia.
He was born in Argentina and is an Israeli citizen. He entered Tel Aviv University in 1979, after earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Nobel Prize-winning professor Robert E. Lucas Jr. He has published more than seventy articles in professional journals and books and has written or edited seven books. His research focuses on monetary theory, globalization, economic and financial crises, and international finance.
Gregory Makoff
Gregory Makoff worked in investment banking at Salmon Brothers and Citigroup, specializing in liability management and debt restructuring for 21 years. Currently, he is a senior researcher at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School; in addition, he has been a non-resident senior researcher since 2015 on sovereign debt issues at the Innovation Centre for International Governance (CIGI), a think tank based in Waterloo, Canada.
Claudio Irigoyen
Claudio Irigoyen is Managing Director and Head of Global Economic Research in the Global Research sector at Bank of America (BofA). In this capacity, he oversees the Global Economic Research team, coordinates global economic forecasts, and produces reports on the global economic outlook.
Prior to joining BofA in 2011, he was responsible for Global Macroeconomic Operations in the Proprietary Trading sector at Deutsche Bank. Prior to working on Wall Street, he served as Chief Economist and Director of Monetary Policy at the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic for five years.
Graham Stock
Graham Stock is a Managing Director and Senior Strategist in Sovereign Emerging Markets at BlueBay Asset Management (currently part of RBC Global Asset Management).
In September 2013, he joined BlueBay Asset Management as a strategist in the Emerging Markets Team. Prior to joining BlueBay, he served as chief strategist at Insparo Asset Management. From 1998 to 2010, he worked in emerging markets research at J.P. Morgan in New York and London for Latin America, Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), and Sub-Saharan Africa. At the beginning of his career, he was an English teacher in Colombia; he served as an economist in the Government of Papua New Guinea; he was a consultant in business management in London and senior economist for Latin America at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Graham Stock holds a Master’s degree in Economic Development from the University of Manchester and a Bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of Sheffield.
Thomas Smith
Thomas Smith is a Portfolio Management Manager and a member of the emerging markets debt team in MetLife Investment Management’s Public Fixed Income group. He is responsible for government and investment-grade debt strategies for the emerging market debt team.
Adrián Armas
Adrián Armas has been manager of economic studies at the Central Reserve Bank of Peru (BCRP) since 2005, except 2017-2018 when he was executive director for Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay on the IMF Board. He has spent most of his career at the Central Bank, where as deputy manager of the monetary sector he participated in the design of the inflation targeting scheme in Peru. Since 2007 he has participated as a consultant in IMF technical assistance missions on monetary policy issues. He has taught Econometrics, International Economics, Macroeconomics and Monetary Theory at several Peruvian universities.
He holds an MA in Political Economy from Boston University. He participated as co-editor of the book “Financial Dollarization: The Policy Agenda” with Alain Ize of the IMF and Eduardo Levy Yeyati of the Torcuato Di Tella University.
Gerardo Licandro
Gerardo Licandro is manager of Economic Advisory at the Central Bank of Uruguay. He is an economist from the University of the Republic of Uruguay, and holds a master’s degree and doctorate in Economics from the University of California, USA. Before assuming his current position, he worked as manager of Economic Research, head of the Department of Studies of the Central Bank of Uruguay and senior economist of the Department of Studies of the same institution.
Among his academic activities, he has been a professor at the University of the Republic of Uruguay, the University of Montevideo, the ORT University and the Catholic University of Uruguay. He currently works as a professor of Monetary Economics at the University of Montevideo. He has researched and published several articles and books on monetary policy and financial issues.
Juan Pablo Nicolini
Juan Pablo Nicolini is a senior research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Before joining the Fed in 2009, he was a professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where he is part-time. He also served as director of the Department of Economics (1994-1999) and president (2001-2009) of the Torcuato Di Tella University. In 2006 and 2007, he was the Tinker Visiting Professor in the Department of Economics and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago. He also served as a visiting researcher at the Bank of Portugal and in the Monetary Policy Division of the European Central Bank.
He studied Economics at the National University of Tucumán (Argentina) and obtained a Master’s and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on monetary theory and policy, and on bounded rationality in macroeconomics. His work has been published in several journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Journal of Monetary Economics, Review of Economic Dynamics, and Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
Fabián Kon
Fabián Kon is general manager of Banco Galicia.
He began his professional career at Arthur Andersen as an auditor and then moved to the consulting area of Andersen Consulting. In 1986 he was Business Manager of Accenture. In 1992 he held the position of financial and administrative director of the Román Group. Subsequently, he was CEO of Exolgan for 5 years.
In 2000, Fabián joined the Galicia Group and in 2006 he became general manager and president of Galicia Seguros. From 2014 to 2016 he was manager of Retail Banking and in March 2016 he was appointed general manager of the Bank.
Under his leadership, the Bank won the Great Place to Work Award as the best Bank to work for in Argentina and in 2019 was recognized with the “Innovative CEO” award by PWC, El Cronista Apertura.
He is a director of IDEA and Amcham.
He is a public accountant from the University of Buenos Aires and has postgraduate studies at IMD Business School in Switzerland, at the Kellogg School of Management in Spain and at the Di Tella University.
Jorge Bledel
Jorge Alberto Bledel is executive chairman of BBVA in Argentina. He has more than 20 years of experience in the BBVA group, having held various leadership positions both locally and regionally. Throughout his career, he has been at the forefront of strategic areas such as business development, digital banking and transformation, innovation and business models, as well as investment management and insurance.
Prior to assuming his current role at BBVA, he was a director of Prisma Medios de Pago between 2017 and 2019, a director at OpenPay between 2023 and 2024, and held positions at Volkswagen Financial Services between 2018 and 2019.
He has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Buenos Aires. He is married and the father of three children. He has lived and worked in both Argentina and Madrid, where he led the business development area for South America between 1999 and 2004.
Osvaldo Giménez
Osvaldo Giménez is executive vice president of MercadoPago and leads MercadoPago throughout Latin America. He joined as country manager of Argentina in 1999 and held that position until being promoted to his current position in February 2004.
Vladimir Werning
Vladimir Werning is vice president of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic. He holds a degree in Economics from the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT).
Prior to taking up his current position at the BCRA, Vladimir Werning was Executive Director at Latin Securities SA, in Buenos Aires, where he dealt with fixed-income markets and credits.
In the public sector, he held several positions, such as Undersecretary of Economic Analysis and Coordination reporting to the Office of the Chief of the Ministerial Cabinet of the Argentine Presidency, where he coordinated the economic, macroeconomic and productive cabinets, and the drafting of laws and decrees together with the Ministry of the Treasury and Public Finance, the Federal Administration of Public Revenue (Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos, AFIP), the National Securities Commission (Comisión Nacional de Valores, CNV) and the Superintendence of Insurance (Superintendencia de Seguros de la Nación, SSN). He further served as representative of the Chief of the Ministerial Cabinet before the Committee of Investments of the Sustainability Guarantee Fund at the Argentine Social Security Administration (Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social, ANSES). He was also the Head of the Advisors Unit of the Economic Policy Secretariat at the Ministry of the Treasury and Finance, and representative of the Ministry of the Treasury and Public Finance before the Board of the BCRA, and before ANSES’ Council for the Procrear Program.
In the private sector, he was CEO of J.P. Morgan Securities in New York as Chief Economist for Latin America, where he also advised the Executive Committee of the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve of New York, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Previously, he had been vice president of the J.P. Morgan bank and chief economist of the Southern Cone, in Buenos Aires.
He is a participating member of the Committee of Sovereign Risk Management of the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC. He was a guest lecturer at the Council of Foreign Relations, Council of the Americas, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Emerging Markets Traders Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; the Latin American Federation of Banks and the Argentine Institute of Finance Executives. He was also an assistant professor of International Trade and Finance at UTDT and a guest lecturer at New York University, Columbia University, Duke University, and the Petersen Institute for International Economics.