The International Cooperation Center held a meeting with the Robert Triffin Institute for International Studies

On October 10, Beijing time, the International Cooperation Center Joint Council (ICC) held an online dialogue with the famous European think-tank Robert Triffin Institute for International Studies. The two sides decided to establish a long-term exchange mechanism and reached important consensus on promoting exchanges and consultations under bilateral and multilateral frameworks on major issues such as "reform of the international monetary system", which are of great concern to the international community.

Zhang Zhixiang, member of the Strategic Advisory Committee of the International Cooperation Center Joint Council (ICC), Chairman of the International Monetary Research Committee and the former Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for China; Zhang Yu, the Convenor of the Joint Council meeting and the Director of the Steering Committee of the ICC; and Bernard Snoy, the President of the Robert Triffin Institute for International Studies, exchanged views on the global macroeconomic situation and issues of common concern.

Anoop Singh, the ICC International advisor on finance, an internationally renowned economist and former Director of the Asia Pacific Region of the IMF attended the meeting online. Cheng Yu, the Executive Secretary General of the ICC; Wu Zhonglin, the Executive Director of the Development Committee of the ICC attended the meeting.

Background knowledge：

Robert Triffin was born in Flobek, Belgium, and received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1938. He is a famous American economist, one of the designers of the European payment Union. He was the Director of the Foreign Exchange Management Department of the International Monetary Fund and a professor at Yale University. He put forward the famous "Triffin problem", namely, "excessive supply of dollars cannot guarantee full conversion to gold, and insufficient supply of dollars means international repayment are insufficient." Robert Triffin, in his book wrote in 1960 <Gold and the Dollar Crisis - The Future of Convertibility> explained the remarkable achievements of the nineteenth century's convertible international monetary system and, more boldly, laid out the basis for radical institutional reform. Although his proposals were not fully implemented in the course of IMF reform, many of the reasonable elements of his analysis were gradually adopted in the development of regional monetary organizations. The global impact of this book is large enough to be considered as a milestone in the field of Western international finance. To preserve the intellectual legacy of economist Robert Triffin and to address new issues in the global economy based on his ideas, the Robert Triffin Research team established the Triffin International Foundation in Italy in 2002, which was renamed the Robert Triffin International Institute in 2015.

In the 1950s, the American economist Robert Triffin, after studying the Bretton Woods system, pointed out that if there is no other reserve currency to supplement or replace the dollar, the dollar-centered parity system will collapse, because in this system, the dollar simultaneously assumes contradictory dual functions. On the one hand, it provides liquidity for world economic growth and international trade development; On the other hand, maintain the currency credit of the US dollar and maintain the exchange ratio between the US dollar and gold. In order to meet the needs of other countries for dollar reserves, the United States can only provide dollars in the form of external liabilities, that is, continuous balance of payments deficit, and long-term balance of payments deficit will lead to excess international solvency, dollar depreciation (" dollar disaster "), and can not maintain the official price of gold. If the value of the dollar is to be stable, the United States must run a balance of payments surplus, which in turn leads to a shortage of dollars and a shortage of international means of liquidity (the "dollar shortage"). The dollar's Bretton Woods Dilemma became known as the "Triffin Dilemma". The historical development of the international monetary system after the Triffin dilemma was proposed proves Robert Triffin's prescience.