Bernard Lietaer

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Bernard Lietaer (born in 1942 in Lauwe, Belgium) is an economist and author. He studies monetary systems and promotes the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or Complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.

Bernard Lietaer, the author of "The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity" (London: Random House, 2001) and the forthcoming "Of Human Wealth," has been active in the realm of money systems for over 25 years in a wide variety of functions. While at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium) he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. His consultant experience in monetary aspects on four continents ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries.

He co-founded one of the largest and most successful currency management firms; GaiaCorp, and managed an offshore currency fund (Gaia Hedge II) which was the world's top performing managed currency fund during the '87-'91 period he ran it.^[1] Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992.^[2]

Lietaer currently lives in Boulder, Colorado and teaches at the Marpa Center for Business and Economics at Naropa University. He studied engineeering at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, and held an Assistant Professorship of International Finance at the same university. He was also a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California, Berkeley.

He is the originator of a complementary currency called the Terra.