Contact: Bill Caldwell, Office of Public Information, Pace University, 212-346-1597, wcaldwell@pace.edu

NEWS SOURCE

Topic: Government bailouts

The value of moderate inflation

Robert Isaak, Ph.D., a political economist and expert on global management and economic trends currently teaching at the University of Mannheim in Germany, is Henry George Professor of International Management at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business in New York.

He is available to comment on the global financial crisis and government bailouts around the world. E-mail risaak@pace.edu, or phone 011-49-6223-4875772 between 6-9 PM European time.

Isaak believes that in a period of turbulence a dose of inflation (though not the extreme Latin American type) is best for stable growth. He came to that conclusion in “Modern Inflation,” a book he co-authored in 1983 with the well-known German economist Wilhelm Hankel, and he believes that is true today. He is now working with Hankel on a new book (his 11th).

Isaak believes the world’s economies are “apt to go through a deflation followed by high inflation (caused by all the government bailouts the world over).” European countries, he says, have been slow to cut interest rates out of fear of the inflation that has been significant in Europe since the introduction of the Euro, but “the real short-term fear should be deflation, as indicated by the steep recent drop in German business confidence.”

For the US, “the Obama big bang spending plan may, indeed, help to resurrect some investor confidence and get the credit markets moving again. Then the period of inflation will kick in, perhaps in 2011 or so,” and “investors who hung to their homes, stocks and commodities will feel happier again to have had something invested in something concrete.”

Isaak’s other books include “The Globalization Gap: How the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Left Further Behind”; “Green Logic: Ecopreneurship, Theory and Ethics”; and “Managing World Economic Change.”

With extensive international experience, Isaak has served as director of the Lubin School's German-American Institute and associate director of its Center for International Business Studies. He has taught at John Hopkins SAIS (Bologna, Italy); The University of Heidelberg (Germany), under a Senior Fulbright grant; Franklin College (Lugano, Switzerland); Group Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Grenoble; and CERAM European Graduate School of Management in Sophia Antipolis, France. He has been a consultant to companies including Siemens, Prudential Intercultural, and Technicon.

The Lubin School of Business is accredited for both business and accounting by AACSB International, an elite distinction shared by fewer than 3% of business schools worldwide. With a tradition of practice-oriented curricula, the school has achieved national recognition for both its graduate and undergraduate programs in U.S.News & World Report and other media. Approximately 4,000 students are enrolled in Lubin’s undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs in Downtown and Midtown New York City, and Pleasantville and White Plains in Westchester. Prominent alumni include Melvin Karmazin, CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio; James Quinn, president of Tiffany & Co.; Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon; Marie Toulantis, former CEO of Barnes&Noble.com; and Richard Zannino, former-CEO of Dow Jones & Company. www.pace.edu/lubin.

For 102 years Pace University has produced thinking professionals by providing high quality professional education resting on a firm base of liberal learning, amid the advantages of the New York metropolitan area. A private university, Pace has campuses in New York City and Westchester County, New York, enrolling more than 13,000 students in bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in its Lubin School of Business, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, Lienhard School of Nursing, School of Education, School of Law, and Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems. www.pace.edu

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