Richard Koo

Richard C. Koo is the Chief Economist of Nomura Research Institute.  He is also serving as a Senior Advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC and is a columnist for the German economic daily, Handelsblatt.

Koo is best known for developing the concept of balance sheet recession which is now widely used around the world to explain post-1990 Japanese and post-2007 Western economies. He has also advised successive prime ministers on how best to deal with Japan’s economic and banking problems.

Before joining Nomura in 1984, Koo was an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1981-84) where he was involved in the rescue of American banks during the Latin American debt crisis. Prior to that, he was a Doctoral Fellow of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1979-81).

In addition to being one of the first non-Japanese to participate in the making of Japan’s 5-year economic plan, Richard Koo was also the only non-Japanese member of the Defense Strategy Study Conference of the Japan Ministry of Defense from 1999-2011.

Author of many books on economy and economics, Koo’s 2008 book “The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics” has been translated into and sold in six different languages. His latest book “Pursued Economy” was published in 2022.

In financial circles, Koo was ranked 1st among over 100 economists covering Japan in the Nikkei Financial Ranking for 1995, 1996 and 1997, and by Institutional Investor magazine for 1998. He was also ranked 1st by Nikkei Newsletter on Bond and Money for 1998, 1999 and 2000 and was awarded the Abramson Award by the National Association for Business Economics in 2001.

Richard Koo holds BAs in Political Science and Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MA in Economics from the Johns Hopkins University. From 1998 to 2010, he was a visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.