Wynne Godley

Wynne Godley, who died in 2010, worked at the Treasury between 1956 and 1970 before becoming a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and director of the university’s Department of Applied Economics. He was the author, with Marc Lavoie, of Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth. He is often credited with anticipating the mass employment of the early 1980s, the problems with monetary union in Europe (in ‘Maastricht and All That’, published in the LRB in 1992) and the 2008 financial crash. Briefly a professional oboist in his youth, he was later a director of the Royal Opera House. He described his ‘disastrous encounter with psychoanalysis’ in a much praised piece in the LRB.