Robert Blohm (born May 27, 1948, in Trenton, New Jersey) is an American and Canadian investment banker, economist, statistician, regulator, and public intellectual.
Canada-Japan Finance.Upon graduating from McGill University, he did marketing, lending, and investment banking at half of Canada's 6 big banks, and helped convert Citibank's Canadian subsidiary into a stand-alone bank to fund itself on the money and capital markets. At half of Japan's big-4 investment banks he helped expand the Japanese capital market in the 1980s to Canadian governments, corporations, utilities and banks and to the African Development Bank.
Disproof of the Economic Feasibility of Quebec Independence.In the early 1990s he argued widely in the US and Canadian press against the economic feasibility of Quebec's separation from Canada, particularly in a series of opinion articles in The Wall Street Journal where he identified as a handicap Quebec's state-directed economy centered on state-controlled electric power production.
Herald of the Internet Economy.He later coined the term "the internet economy" in a Wall Street Journal opinion article by that title in 1996 co-authored by Takuma Amano, the Japanese CEO of Micrognosis, the monopoly IT provider of market information to all bank trading rooms. The article made the first ever estimate of internet's contribution to GDP equal to all the previous year's GDP growth. Vice President Al Gore alluded to the term in his 1996 election acceptance speech. The authors extended that estimate to employment for The Global Internet Project consortium of the world's main IT providers and computer and router manufacturers, at a conference hosted by the UK House of Lords.
Electric Power Marketization and Reliability.In the later 1990s Blohm published articles in the general and trade press supporting restructuring the wholesale electric power industry into competitive markets for energy, transmission and reliability. He opposed imposition of a legally mandated single centralized spot market known as Standard Market Design that was ultimately rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Blohm has since been repeatedly elected to the regulatory Standards Committee and former Operating Committee of the North American Electric Reliability Corp. to set risk-based standards for reliably operating and planning the electric system in a competitive market. Blohm advised all of Japan's electric and gas companies and the Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry on reliable US-style deregulation of the electric power industry into competitive markets.
Deconstruction of Japan Inc.With his investment banking associate, Takuma Amano, he co-authored a top-of-page opinion article in 1997 in "The Wall Street Journal" that de-constructed Japan Inc. in next day response to the last attempt by a Japanese Prime Minister to talk-down the US dollar. The article was reprinted a week later in the first issue of "The Asian Wall Street Journal" published after the Handover of Hong Kong as a warning to the Chinese government not to repeat Japan's mistake of a managed economy. The 1997 Asian financial crisis began that day.
Contribution to China's Economic Reform and Marketization of China's Energy Industry.As an economics graduate student at Columbia University under Nobelist Robert Mundell, father of supply-side economics and of the Euro, Blohm introduced him to China which adopted many of Mundell's policies for a time. Following "New York Times" coverage of Blohm's diagnosis of the US/Canada Great Northeast Blackout of 2003, Blohm advised China's electric grids, government, and oil and gas industry on proper marketization of the energy industry, taught the subject at North China Electric Power University, and promoted it in Chinese media while living in Beijing for the decade ending in 2015.
Criticism of Chinese Government Policy.While in China, Blohm proposed improvements to Chinese economic policy in Chinese media and in "The Wall Street Journal" where he has continued to more broadly criticize China's governance since the current regime's definitive reversal of the country's policy direction begun in reaction to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. An article by Blohm prompted the government to abandon evaluating officials' performance on the basis of economic growth alone. Blohm has criticized China for triggering the 2007–2008 financial crisis by subsidizing resource inputs to Chinese industrial production and therefore driving the commodities boom that drove global prices and the inflation fear that prompted the interest rate increases that triggered the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In an August 24, 2011, interview on Fox Business Network[1] he warned that China could become like Nazi Germany and that its population would begin declining in 17 years, three years later than it actually began to. For its final 15 years, Blohm was a frequent contributor to the Washington, DC, based Nelson Report daily newsletter on East Asia policy managed by his college roommate, Chris Nelson.
Last Promotion of Modern Scientific Philosophy in China.In 2011, just before the close of China's reform era and the ascension of China's current regime, Blohm arranged a lecture tour of Peking University and Tsinghua University, the Central Party School's philosophy department, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences by his McGill professor, world-renowned philosopher-physicist Mario Bunge, who urged China to advance beyond Karl Marx and to reject "dialectics" as Hegelian nonsense. At the Central University of Finance and Economics Blohm had already taught the first ever course in China in the History of Western Philosophy and Science, funded by the World Bank.