Ralph C. Bryant

Ralph C. Bryant is a senior fellow emeritus in the Economic Studies and the Global Economy and Development programs at the Brookings Institution. His primary fields of expertise are international economics, monetary economics, and macroeconomic policy.

Prior to joining Brookings, Bryant was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board.  After promotions, he was the director of the Division of International Finance and the international economist for the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee. He has frequently participated in advisory groups and served as consultant to U.S. and international organizations such as the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. Treasury, the Congressional Budget Office, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, and the National Science Foundation. He has also served in teaching capacities, as a professor in International Finance at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and as a program director for the SEANZA Central Banking Course. He has served as a visiting fellow at numerous foreign central banks and foreign universities.

For numerous years, Bryant was a Trustee of and Adviser to the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. During 1995-97, he served as Chair of the School’s Board of Trustees. He continues to participate in the School’s activities.

Bryant was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in the United Kingdom from 1960 to 1963. In 1969 he was awarded an International Affairs Fellowship to England by the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1983 he was the first recipient of the Distinguished Fellowship in International Banking and Finance at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

Queen Elizabeth honored Bryant in 1990 as an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) and later in 1996 as an OBE (Officer of the British Empire). During 1996, he was the Professorial Fellow in Monetary Economics in New Zealand, based at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Victoria University of Wellington. In 1989 and 1990 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies at the Bank of Japan.

Bryant was born in November 1938 in Colorado. He attended public schools in Colorado and North Carolina.  Bryant received his bachelor’s degree in History, the Arts and Letters from Yale University in 1960. While attending Oxford University, he received a postgraduate degree in Economics in 1963.  From 1963-1966, he studied Economics at Yale University, was awarded a Ph.D. in 1966.  He was married in 1961 to Coralie (“Corky”) Marcus Bryant; she was a resident scholar at American University, the Overseas Development Institute, and the World Bank, and finally a Professor at Columbia University.  Bryant has three daughters and five grandchildren.

Bryant’s most recent book, published by Brookings (2020), is Governance for a Higgledy-Piggledy Planet, Crafting a Balance between Local Autonomy and External Openness.

His other books include Turbulent Waters: Cross-Border Finance and International Governance (Brookings, 2003); Crisis Prevention and Prosperity Management for the World Economy (Brookings, 2004); The International Coordination of National Stabilization Policies (Brookings, 1995); Evaluating Policy Regimes: New Research in Empirical Macroeconomics (co-author and editor, Brookings, 1993); External Deficits and the Dollar: The Pit and the Pendulum (Brookings, 1988); Empirical Macroeconomics for Interdependent Economies (co-author and editor, Brookings, 1988); International Financial Intermediation (Brookings, 1987); Controlling Money:The Federal Reserve and Its Critics (Brookings,1983); and Money and Monetary Policy in Interdependent Economies (Brookings, 1980).

Bryant’s numerous individual papers and journal articles have focused on monetary and fiscal policies, international aspects of macroeconomic modeling, governance and reform of international financial institutions, and consequences for the world economy of population aging.  He was a primary co-organizer of the Brookings Projects on Empirical Macroeconomics for Interdependent Economies and on The Global Dimensions of Demographic Change.  For many years, Bryant organized and supervised circulation of a series of Brookings Discussion Papers in International Economics (BDPIE). Examples include:  BDPIE No. 166, Bryant, “Cross-Border Macroeconomic Implications of Demographic Change (August-September 2004); BDPIE No. 152, Bryant, “Standards and Prudential Oversight for an Integrating World Financial System” (November 1999); BDPIE No. 141, Bryant and W. McKibbin, “Issues in Modeling the Global Dimensions of Demographic Change” (December 1998).