Raymond Mikesell

Background

Mikesell was born in Eaton, Ohio.

Education

Ohio State University.

Career

He received a bachelor"s degree from Ohio State University (Ohio State University) and, in 1939, received a doctorate in economics from Ohio State University. From 1937 to 1941, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. During World World War II, Mikesell became an adviser to Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White. In his Bretton Woods Debates: A Memoir, Mikesell notes that he provided White with data that supported the United States" free trade position and calculated the initial quotas for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. He also served as an economic adviser to the Joint British-American Cabinet Committee on Palestine.

He served as a consultant to the World Bank, the United Nations and the Organization of American States.

He later argued for reform of the International Monetary Fund and abolishment of the World Bank, which he thought had become a useless and expensive bureaucracy. Mikesell joined the University of Virginia department of Economics as professor in 1946 and accepted the West.E. Miner Chair at the University of Oregon in 1957, where he taught until 1993.

He was an avid tennis player and active outdoorsman, and he often took his doctoral students hiking before advising them on their dissertations as they sat around a campfire. Mikesell died at his home in Eugene, Oregon, aged 93, from natural causes.

Membership

Mikesell was a member of the technical staff at the Bretton Woods conference, which resulted in the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Mikesell served the United States. government in a number of capacities, including serving as representative of the United States Treasury Department in Cairo in 1943-1944 and as the United States. delegate to the Middle East Financial Conference in Cairo (April, 1944). As a member of the United States Currency Mission to Saudi Arabia (1948).

As member of the staff of the National Commission on Materials Policy.

And Chief of the Foreign Resources Division (1951). He was a member of the editorial board on the Middle East Journal from 1947.

Connections

Friend:

Frank Coe