Mr. Lamfalussy was the first president of the European Monetary Institute, a short-lived institution created in 1994 with the sole purpose of setting up the European Central Bank and then willing itself out of existence.Arne Dedert
Alexandre Lamfalussy, a Hungarian refugee from communism who emigrated to Belgium with a few dollars in his pocket and went on to become a founding father of the euro, has died at the age of 86.
Mr. Lamfalussy died on Saturday, according to Belgian media. The European Central Bank (ECB) acknowledged the death in a statement, but no cause was given.
Mr. Lamfalussy was the first president of the European Monetary Institute, a short-lived institution created in 1994 with the sole purpose of setting up the ECB and then willing itself out of existence. The ECB said in a statement Monday that "core building stones" of the shared currency were put in place under his stewardship. It called him "one of the euro's founding fathers."
Mr. Lamfalussy defended the euro as a risk worth taking after the sovereign-debt crisis that came close to shattering the currency. The euro was introduced on Jan. 1, 1999, with 11 member countries. It now has 19.
"The European Union couldn't exist without monetary union," he said in memoirs published in 2013. "We had to do it the hard way, resolutely."
Mr. Lamfalussy's role in forging a path to monetary union began in 1976 when he embarked on a career at the Bank for International Settlements, the Swiss-based clearinghouse for the world's central banks. He became its general manager in 1985 and, three years later, joined a committee of central bankers who sketched a road map for the European currency.
Turning the road map into reality became Mr. Lamfalussy's job when the EMI was established in Frankfurt, home of the German Bundesbank. Germany's monetary philosophy, scaffold of interest rates and definition of inflation became part of the ECB's toolkit.
Born on April 26, 1929, in Kapuvar, Hungary, Alexandre Lamfalussy fled his homeland in 1949 as the Iron Curtain was sealing off Eastern Europe. With three friends, he snuck across the snowy border to Austria, en route to a Belgian university scholarship. He studied economics at the Catholic University of Leuven and obtained his doctorate from Oxford University in 1957, the same year that six western European countries signed the Treaty of Rome.
His monetary expertise led to the post of economic adviser at Banque de Bruxelles, a private bank. He became chairman of the bank's executive board in 1971.