Master the economics they never taught you — before the next crisis hits!

If you are reading this, you have probably already sensed what I spent decades watching from the inside: that the economic frameworks most decision-makers carry into boardrooms, ministries, and policy chambers were forged in a world that no longer exists — and that the institutions responsible for updating them have been conspicuously slow to do so.

I did not arrive at that conclusion from a distance. Four decades of hands-on advisory work across Eurasia, Africa, Latin America, and the Atlantic economies will teach you things that no journal article can — not because theory is worthless, but because theory untested against the friction of real markets, real crises, and real political economies (institutional economics) is something closer to theology than science. I have sat with central bankers, worked alongside ministers, and watched sophisticated organisations make catastrophic decisions because their analytical frameworks had no place for cronyism, nomenklatura capture, or the kind of systemic rent-seeking that quietly hollows out an economy before anyone formally declares a recession.

The 2008 Great Recession was the moment that should have forced a reckoning with all of this. In some quarters, it did. The work of scholars like Michael Spence, Elinor Ostrom, and the reformers in the INET Bretton Woods tradition represents exactly the kind of rigorous, reality-grounded alternative that mainstream economics resisted for too long. I built this seminar to make those frameworks operational — to take Nobel-calibre thinking out of the footnotes of academic papers and put it to work in the comparative case material I know best: post-Soviet market transitions, sub-Saharan institutional innovation, Latin American structural vulnerability, and the governance failures embedded in North American and European corporate architecture.

Here is the core objection I hear from senior professionals: I don't have time for another course that tells me things I already know wrapped in new vocabulary. I understand that objection, and I take it seriously. This seminar will not do that to you. It will, however, ask you to question frameworks you may have relied on for years — and to replace them with something more honest and more useful. The personal risk-management playbook you build here is calibrated to your specific role, whether you lead a household, a firm, an academic institution, or a government agency. The comparative case studies are drawn from geographies most curricula treat as footnotes. The intellectual standards are high because you are capable of meeting them.

If you are genuinely hungry for a rigorous, experience-grounded alternative to the doctrines that failed us — not reassurance, not slogans, but hard frameworks that hold up under pressure — then this seminar was designed with you in mind. I look forward to working through it with you.