| Notities: |
| -Persoon | Bron: https://bobdowling.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/nicolas-krul-april-9-1933-to-april-1-2016
I first met Nicolas Krul in May of 1980 in Geneva. He’d picked a lakeside restaurant with an outdoor terrace for lunch and it was warm enough to shed suit jackets and loosen up in the spring sun. Nicolas said the fish was passable and he ordered a bottle of chilled Mosel white, light and fruity for a spring day. Nicolas had a lean angular face, was trim and soft spoken, and sported a dark bristly mustache, a distinguishing feature that he maintained for life, even as it turned white like the bristles of a shaving brush. Nicolas was Dutch and very proud to be a “subject”of his Queen rather than a “citizen” of a Republic. His father’s side had a distinguished Prussian military back ground dating to the 15th century. That explained his erect straight shoulders bearing and of course the mustache.
We spent a lot of time talking that afternoon. Nicolas’s name had been passed onto me by my colleague Ed Mervosh, BusinessWeek’s European Economic Correspondent. I was succeeding Ed and of the many source names he gave me he said Nicolas might become one of my most important contacts. It became clear that afternoon that Nic Krul as we later called him, saw the world in broad strokes. He was a classically trained European economist, meaning the fundamentals of supply and demand drove his thinking. Although not a Milton Friedman monetarist, he believed the wanton printing of currency, as the Federal Reserve has with some $2 trillion of money creation to bail out the banks, will lead to bad ends.
Nicolas participated in the annual Santa Colomba Conference in Siena Italy, founded by Nobel Laureate Robert Mundell, after the Bretton Woods Monetary system breakdown in 1971 and the first dollar crisis. After that Nicolas counted among his counterparts Paul Volcker and like minded economists such as Richard Fisher of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and Michael Mussa, chief economist of the IMF. His mentor had been M.W. Holtrup former head of the Dutch Central Bank. He enriched his economic outlook with a long historical perspective, not only about Europe but the roots of civilization over centuries.
By the time I met him Nicolas was the founder of the Gulf and Occidental Investment Company, a Geneva based money management firm with mostly Arab state clients, including the Kuwait Investment Authority, United Arab Emirates and maybe a slice of one of the Saudi investment companies. He had started out with Dutch banks after getting his Phd in Holland and moved to Lombard Odier, a private investment bank in Geneva and then to his own firm. He knew how to make a good living in finance, but his passion was the world. The name of the game in the early 1980’s was recycling oil revenue, called petro dollars, from the Gulf States back to the West. The U.S. Treasury had even constructed special petro bonds for Gulf investors to get the money back in circulation. As an adviser, Nicolas would take account of those bonds along with many other fixed income securities for his clients. The interest of the Arab states was not high performance but preserving the financial wealth earned from oil. American money managers often got this wrong, touting performance as a way to elbow out the less yield driven Europeans. The Arabs weren’t seeking outsized returns, they wanted advisers they could trust over the long haul to keep their money safe, yielding enough to maintain a pension state.
That was Nic Krul’s business and by his personal lifestyle he seemed quite good at it. On one visit he picked me up in a blue Maserati convertible. “I was walking by a car lot and couldn’t resist. It was only $15,000, but still a stupid thing to buy”, he laughed. He had a penthouse apartment in Geneva with a private elevator and two black dogs guarding the entrance. You could make enemies in his business and I often wondered if the dogs were for security and well as companions. No, he said. They were the loves of his life. Besides the Gulf clients, he also advised the Iranians after the hostage crisis, when their U.S. assets were frozen, and counted the Assad family of Syria as clients. He said he once dangled a very young Bashaar-Al-Assad on his knee. In the early 1980s when property was depressed, Nicolas bought a villa in Menerbes, a village in Provence, on property called Quatre Sources, which came with an impressive vineyard.“ I think I got a good price but now I have to be a vinter and live with the French” he laughed. He had a gimlet eye for French pretentions. After one dinner party he dissected the pro civilities of his guests with hilarious scalpel like accuracy as we polished off several more bottles from his vineyard.
After I returned to the States in the mid 1980’s we lost touch for a quite a while. Nicolas did not use email. Occasionally I’d get a mailed piece he’d written on the economic outlook and a beautifully embossed Christmas card that he sent with his wife Dorothy, a sophisticated Indian woman who was an economist in Geneva for Dean Witter. Then one afternoon I got a call in the office asking if I could come for lunch the next week. I joined Nicolas and Dorothy in the dining room at the Ritz Carlton in Manhattan and learned some disturbing news. Dorothy had breast cancer that had metastasized and Nicholas was taking her to Boston for an experimental treatment called Interluken 2 designed to boost the immune system. They made the stop in New York to rest before treatment. Dorothy’s treatment brought us together for lunch every quarter and then more frequently. At one meeting, she told me she’d arranged a marriage for Nicolas to a wife like herself but younger. I was taken aback with Dorothy’s frankness. I later learned that it was appropriate among Indian wives to select a successor. “Nicolas will be well taken care of”, she said.
Nicolas’s new wife was Mehr Banaji of Mumbai, who Dorothy had met while taking music lessons from Mehr’s mother. How Dorothy knew Mehr, several decades younger than Nicolas, would be the right wife is unknown. Mehr and Nicolas had seen each other once briefly in Provence and Mehr tells of her trepidation before Nicolas’ first visit–partially alleviated by a dream her mother had of a man with heavy Navy blue overcoat who she believed would be Mehr’s husband. Nicolas asked: “Will you marry me?” As Mehr tells it, she then asked Nicolas. “Do you own a woolen overcoat?” Nicolas said yes, “knee length and Navy blue.” Once married in an Indian ceremony Mehr became a devoted wife. Nicolas moved to Mehr’s penthouse apartment in Mumbai where he wrote his monthly economic commentary in longhand on a legal pad. Mehr would then transcribe his work into email to send to friends around the world. Nicolas refused to learn the computer, mobile phone or any other electronic “interference”, arguing his thinking came from putting pen to paper. If you saw something you wanted to send to Nicolas, you’d email it to Mehr and she’d print it out to him. In 2015, Nicolas completed full text of his life in longhand. “I work for a genius” Mehr would say. We friends didn’t go that far but we appreciated Nicolas’s ability to cut to the essence of argument, something people called geniuses do.
“He made us think” fellow editor Bruce Nussbaum recalled. Besides European economists, Nicolas said the philosopher Martin Heidegger and Heidegger’s lover Hannah Arendt were two of the greatest influences in his life. His father had sent him at 18 to study under Heidegger.
I reconnected with Nicolas and met Mehr while living in Mumbai in 2012. It was there than I learned of Nicolas’s life long fascination with India. He said he’d save up enough time working at Lombard Odier to take off 6 months and would go to India and ride busses, trains and bullock carts throughout the country partially disguised in a long robe and scarf. It was then that he began collecting Indian artworks. One weekend we went to Mehr’s family country house in Poona and drove to nearby hilltop where Mehr and Nicolas were building a large villa to house his life’s collection of books, art and wine. It was finished last year and Nicolas transferred all of his belongings from France to the new estate, conjoining his European heritage with his artifacts of ancient India.
Nicolas was given a Vedisc or ancient Hindu funeral on April 2 in an 12th century temple district of Mumbai called in Malabar Hill, overlooking the Indian Ocean. His flower covered bier was set aflame and his ashes scattered with flowers into the sea. Another portion will be scattered along a migratory bird flyway at the country house in Poona. His death was officially listed as cardiac arrest but he’d been told a few days earlier that a rare blood disease called ITP was consuming his red blood cells and that it was not reversible. He’d sent out his last economic commentary in March. He was 83.
Mehr cited this from The Bhagvad Gita, Chapter II Verse 20
“This is not born nor does It die, nor, having been will ever again cease to be; This, is unborn, eternal, changeless, ancient, It is not killed when the body is killed”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bron: http://graduateinstitute.ch/fr/home/alumni/news.html/_/news/alumni/2016/news
Nicolas Gerrit Krul (PhD in Political Sciences, ’64), President of The Alumni Association (1967 - 1977) and co-founder of The International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies (1973), has recently passed away.
Nicolas Krul was born in 1932 in The Hague, Netherlands, and came from an aristocratic Russian family. He studied law, and later became a diplomat, before joining The Graduate Institute to do his PhD. He was known by those close to him as a wise, cordial and exceptional individual, who was fond of history, culture, music and art, and who spoke several languages fluently.
Mr. Krul remained very attached to The Institute where he studied economics and interpretation and wrote his thesis entitled: La politique conjoncturelle en Belgique, aux Pays-Bas et en Suisse, as well as numerous publications for financial reviews. He became president of the Alumni Association in 1967, and actively began a recruitment campaign where he managed to enlarge the association from 400 to 439 the following year.
His career path was impressive. For many years’ he was personal interpreter and adviser for the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joseph Luns, one of the leading figures at the time of the unification of Europe. He later became economic advisor for the International Saving Banks Institute (1965 - 1969), then economic Research Director for Lombard, Odier & Cie (1970 - 1977), and finally general Director to Gulf and Occidental (1977 - 1985).
In 1973, he became co-founder of the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies along with Pierre Keller. Before his retirement in 2000, he established himself in 1986 as an independent financial advisor, and advised towards different multinationals in Asia and in the USA, towards the governments of Kuwait, Quatar and Abu Dhabi. After retiring, he continued publishing theoretical papers on monetary practices and finance, and remained actively involved in related conferences. |
|
