Francis Cripps

Wynne Godley (1926–2010)

Wynne Godley started his career as a civil servant at the UK Treasury. In 1970, Nicholas Kaldor convinced him to move to Cambridge and to become the Director of the Department of Applied Economics, a position he held for nearly two decades. Godley founded the Cambridge Economic Policy Group, giving rise to New Cambridge economics, based on an empirical approach that had a large impact on policy matters in the 1970s. This method, associated with the financial balances approach, was further developed in the 1990s when Godley worked as a forecaster at the Levy Economics Institute in the USA, helping him to identify the unsustainable processes that would lead to the 2001 and 2008 crises. In the academic world, Godley is now best known for his advocacy of the stock–flow consistent approach, which some consider as the Holy Grail of macroeconomics, as it integrates the real and the financial sides of the economy.