- Finance & Banking
- Economics
- Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
- Revitalizing American Institutions
Jon Hartley and George Tavlas discuss George’s career as an economist, including as a central banker at the Bank of Greece, the history of monetarism (including George’s new book The Monetarists), Milton Friedman, and the evolution of central banking over the past decades, including its decline since the 1980s, and its renewed post-pandemic interest.
Recorded on August 29, 2025.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
George S. Tavlas has represented Greece at the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (as the Alternate to the Governor of the Bank of Greece) since 2008. He was the Director General of the Bank of Greece from 2010 to 2013, and was a Member of the General Council and the Monetary Policy Council of the Bank of Greece from 2014 to 2020. He participated in the management and resolution of the sovereign and banking crises in Greece. He was involved in the process of Greece's entry into the Eurozone as a key advisor to the Greek central bank's governors at the time. Tavlas was a member of the Supervisory Board of the Hellenic Corporation for Assets and Participations (HCAP), the sovereign wealth fund of the Greek government, from 2016 to 2019. In this role, he contributed to the design and implementation of the framework responsible for the privatization of state-owned enterprises in Greece as well as for the overall management of the large portfolio of state-owned assets in Greece.
Before joining the Bank of Greece, Tavlas was a Division Chief at the International Monetary Fund. He also worked as a senior economist at the U.S. Department of State, and as an advisor for the World Bank and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
He has been Editor-in-Chief of Open Economies Review, (published by Springer) since 2005. He was a Visiting Professor at Leicester University, and a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, the Reserve Bank of South Africa, the LeBow School of Business at Drexel University, the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, and Duke University’s Center for the History of Political Economy.
Tavlas is an active researcher in the areas of monetary policy, monetary doctrine, and time-series econometrics, with numerous academic publications. His book, The Monetarists: The Making of the Chicago Monetary Tradition, 1927–1960, was published by the University of Chicago Press in June 2023.
Jon Hartley is currently a Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an economics PhD Candidate at Stanford University, a Research Fellow at the UT-Austin Civitas Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Jon also is the host of the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution, a member of the Canadian Group of Economists, and the chair of the Economic Club of Miami.
Jon has previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as a Fixed Income Portfolio Construction and Risk Management Associate and as a Quantitative Investment Strategies Client Portfolio Management Senior Analyst and in various policy/governmental roles at the World Bank, IMF, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Bank of Canada.
Jon has also been a regular economics contributor for National Review Online, Forbes and The Huffington Post and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Globe and Mail, National Post, and Toronto Star among other outlets. Jon has also appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, Fox News, Bloomberg, and NBC and was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 Law & Policy list, the 2017 Wharton 40 Under 40 list and was previously a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
Each episode of Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century, a video podcast series and the official podcast of the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group, focuses on getting into the weeds of economics, finance, and public policy on important current topics through one-on-one interviews. Host Jon Hartley asks guests about their main ideas and contributions to academic research and policy. The podcast is titled after Milton Friedman‘s famous 1962 bestselling book Capitalism and Freedom, which after 60 years, remains prescient from its focus on various topics which are now at the forefront of economic debates, such as monetary policy and inflation, fiscal policy, occupational licensing, education vouchers, income share agreements, the distribution of income, and negative income taxes, among many other topics.
For more information, visit: capitalismandfreedom.substack.com/
