Release Date: Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Economist Richard H. Timberlake Jr. to deliver Terry College of Business' David McCord Wright Lecture April 5 at UGA Chapel

ATHENS, Ga. — Terry College of Business professor emeritus and libertarian economist Richard H. Timberlake Jr. will deliver the Economics Department's David McCord Wright Lecture on April 5 at 3:30 pm in the UGA Chapel.

The title of Timberlake's presentation is "The Great Contraction and Great Depression, 1929-1941: A Story of Three Personalities and an Apparition," an examination of the Federal Reserve System's policy-making structure between 1922 and 1933 and its disastrous consequences. The lecture is open to the public.

Timberlake, who continues to live in Athens since retiring, is a graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio. He went on to earn a master's degree from Columbia University and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He taught at several colleges before coming to the University of Georgia in 1964, where he was a professor of banking and finance and one of Wright's colleagues. He moved over to the economics faculty in 1985, where he remained until his retirement in 1990.

He is the author of several books on monetary policy, including Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History, and is an expert on the Federal Reserve and the history of central banking. Timberlake is also the author of They Never Saw Me Then, a memoir of his experiences as a B-17 co-pilot with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II.

David McCord Wright, a leading academic economist of the 1950s and 1960s, was a native of Savannah, Ga. He was on the faculty of the University of Virginia and held several federal government advisory positions before joining the faculty of UGA's business school in 1962. He remained on the faculty until his death in 1968.

A staunch advocate of free markets, Wright received his doctorate from Harvard University, where he was a student of Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian statesman-scholar who wrote "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy."

The David McCord Wright Lecture Series is supported by a fund created in 1987 with an initial endowment by UGA alumnus James E. Baine, who was one of Wright's former students. The series brings notable scholars to the UGA campus to speak to students, faculty and staff on topics relevant to the study of economics.

Another of Wright's former students, Phil Gramm, who went on to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate after earning two degrees from UGA in the 1960s, was the inaugural speaker for the series. Other past speakers include former Federal Reserve Bank President Robert D. McTeer Jr. and Reagan budget director James C. Miller III, also former students of Wright's.

###