Robert Blohm

Robert Blohm (born May 27, 1948, in Trenton, New Jersey) is an American and Canadian investment banker, economist and statistician.

Initially doing marketing and finance at Canadian commercial banks after graduating from McGill University, he helped enable Citibank's Canadian subsidiary to fund itself on the money and capital markets as a stand-alone bank. At Japanese investment banks he helped expand the Japanese capital market in the 1980s to Canadian governments, corporations, utilities and banks and to the African Development Bank.

In the early 1990s he argued widely in the US and Canadian press against the economic feasibility of Quebec's separation from Canada, particularly in a series of opinion articles in The Wall Street Journal where he identified Quebec's state-directed economy centered on state-controlled electric power production as a handicap.

He later coined the term "the internet economy" in a Wall Street Journal opinion article by that title in 1996 co-authored by the Japanese CEO of Micrognosis, the monopoly IT provider of market information to all bank trading rooms. The article made the first ever estimate of internet's contribution to GDP equal to all the previous year's GDP growth. Vice President Al Gore alluded to the term in his 1996 election acceptance speech. The authors extended that estimate to employment for The Global Internet Project consortium of the world's main IT providers and computer and router manufacturers, at a conference hosted by the UK House of Lords.

In the later 1990s Blohm published articles in the general and trade press against restructuring the wholesale electric industry into a centralized spot market known as Standard Market Design that was ultimately rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Blohm has since been repeatedly elected to the regulatory Standards Committee and Operating Committee of the North American Electric Reliability Corp. to set risk-based standards for reliably operating and planning the electric system in a competitive market. Blohm advised all of Japan's electric and gas companies and the Japanese government on reliable US-style deregulation of the electric power industry into competitive markets.

With his Japanese partner he co-authored a top-of-page opinion article in 1997 in "The Wall Street Journal" that de-constructed Japan Inc. in next day response to the last attempt by a Japanese Prime Minister to talk-down the US dollar. The article was reprinted a week later in the first issue of "The Asian Wall Street Journal" published after the Handover of Hong Kong as a warning to the Chinese government not to repeat Japan's mistake of a managed economy. The Asian Financial Crisis immediately followed that reprinting.

As an economics graduate student at Columbia University under Nobelist Robert Mundell, father of supply-side economics and of the Euro, Blohm introduced him to China which adopted many of Mundell's policies for a time. Following "New York Times" coverage of Blohm's diagnosis of the US/Canada Great Northeast Blackout of 2003 Blohm advised China's electric grids, government, and oil and gas industry on proper marketization of the energy industry, taught the subject at North China Electric Power University, and promoted it in Chinese media while living in Beijing for the decade ending in 2015.

While in China, Blohm proposed improvements to Chinese economic policy in Chinese media and in "The Wall Street Journal" where he has continued to more broadly criticize China's governance since the current regime's definitive reversal of the country's policy direction begun in reaction to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC). An article by Blohm prompted the government to abandon evaluating officials' performance on the basis of economic growth alone. Blohm has criticized China for triggering the GFC by subsidizing resource inputs to Chinese industrial production and therefore driving the commodities boom that drove global prices and the inflation fear that prompted the interest rate increases that triggered the sub-prime mortgage crisis at the heart of the GFC.

In 2011, just before the close of China's reform era and the ascension of China's current regime, Blohm arranged a lecture tour of Beijing and Tsinghua Universities, the Central Party School's philosophy department, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences by his McGill professor, world-renowned philosopher-physicist Mario Bunge, who urged China to advance beyond Karl Marx and to reject "dialectics" as Hegelian nonsense. At the Central University of Finance and Economics Blohm had already taught the first ever course in China in the History of Western Philosophy and Science, funded by the World Bank.

References

• Publications by or featuring Robert Blohm
• Who's Who in the World
• Who's Who in America
• Who's Who in Finance and Business