Richard Koo


Richard C. Koo is a Taiwanese-American economist living in Japan specializing in balance sheet recessions. He is Chief Economist at the Nomura Research Institute.

Early life and education

Koo was born in Kobe. His father, Koo Kwang-ming, was an activist in the Taiwan independence movement then living in exile in Japan, and the brother of the prominent Taiwanese businessman Koo Chen-fu. Koo lived in Tokyo for 13 years in his youth, and later attended the University of California, Berkeley where he received a BA in Political Science and Government in 1976. He then proceeded to Johns Hopkins University for graduate school, where he received an MA in 1981.

Career

Upon graduation from Johns Hopkins University, Koo worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as an economist from 1981 to 1984.
He then joined Nomura in 1984 as its first expatriate researcher - first as senior economist from 1984 to 1997. He later became the chief economist at Nomura Research Institute starting in 1997.
Landon Thomas wrote about Koo's analysis in late 2011 in the New York Times, saying that Koo's 2011 "causes, cure, and politics" publication "has gone viral on the Web". Thomas was discussing the divergence between the way the U.S. and British governments addressed their banking crises in the 2008-9 financial crisis and the way Europe was beginning to in late 2011.

Publications