Charles Goodhart

Charles Goodhart was born on 23 October 1936 in Oxford, England to Arthur Lehman Goodhart, an American residing in England, and his English wife, Cecily Carter. After he finished school, he completed two years of compulsory national military service (1955–1956) in which he was involved with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Suez Crisis and earned the rank of second lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps. which was commissioned by the federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He stayed at the London School of Economics until 1968. ==Career==

Bank of England (1968–1985) Charles left the London School of Economics to work a temporary two-year assignment at the Bank of England. During this time Goodhart served as the first secretary of the Monetary Review Committee, who provided summarised views of monetary developments to the Chancellor and Treasury of England. This quote became known as Goodhart's Law. Goodhart's Law is commonly expressed as: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". In the early 1980's, Goodhart joined the home finance division of the Bank of England, under John Fford. which was reprinted later in Economica. During this period (1988 – 1995) his work focused on foreign exchange markets, specifically analysing the efficient-market hypothesis. To help with this research, Goodhart (with the help of Reuters) built his own data series. He then collaborated with Swiss firm Olsen and Associates to lead conferences about the importance of high speed data analysis and collection. Questions he asked Neil Shephard around 1991, encourage the latter to work on problems in financial econometrics. Goodhart helped advise and publicly supported the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act (RBNZ) 1989, which permitted the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to vary interest rates to help meet agreed inflation targets. In 1997 he was appointed a CBE for services to monetary economics. Four years prior to the 2008 financial crisis, Goodhart identified how the global economy was financially unstable in his Per Jacobsson lecture 'Some New Directions for Financial Stability?'. In an article included as part of the South African Reserve Bank Conference, Goodhart assessed the actions taken to provide global financial stability and concluded: "proposed reforms are incomplete and/or partially misdirected". In 2015, Goodhart critiqued the Warsh Review of the Bank of England's policy on monetary process. He was also an economic consultant at Morgan Stanley from 2009 until 2016, when he retired at the age of 80. At the 2021 Central Banking Awards, Goodhart was awarded the Central Banking Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on monetary frameworks, risk management and foreign exchange markets as well as his involvement in the Hong Kong peg, the independence of the Royal Bank of New Zealand and the creation of Goodhart's Law. == Influence ==

Goodhart's Law One of Charles Goodhart's most prominent contributions to monetary economics is known as Goodhart's Law. Charles wrote this law in the footnotes of his paper Problems of monetary management: the UK experience He advocates for policies that are supported by a strong theoretical base and backed up by empirical evidence and data. Throughout his career, Goodhart played a role in improving the practice of financial regulation and central banking by making it easier for governments and central bankers to benefit public welfare by dampening economic cycles. Recently, Goodhart collaborates with a Vietnamese economist named Dr. Lý Hoàng Vũ to study influences of democracy, economic growth and personal characteristics on institutional trust. They also work on the link between trust and climate change mitigation. ==Selected works==

Google Scholar listed Charles Goodhart being the author or co-author of 539 articles and books by the end of 2017. His most cited works include Money, Information and Uncertainty and The Evolution of Central Banks. ==References==