Event Summary
William Rhodes, the long-time senior international executive of Citibank and dean of global debt negotiators, delivered a speech entitled "Lessons Learned from Past Debt Crises for Today's Problems in Europe and the United States" at the Peterson Institute for International Economics on September 28, 2011. His speech was based on his new book Banker to the World.
William Rhodes has been one of the true pioneers of international financial diplomacy. His experience dates to restructuring agreements in the late 1970s, and he played a central role in organizing the global response to the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. As a senior official at Citi, he maintained a leadership position on these issues through the Asian and subsequent financial crises of the late 1990s and early years of this century. He remains active today including inter alia as Chairman of the United States-Korea Business Council, Chairman Emeritus of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, and Professor-at-Large at Brown University.