Architect of the global economic order.

Bergsten, C. Fred

Helmut Schmidt, who died on November 10, was justly renowned as a world statesman and one of the greatest leaders of postwar Germany. He was also a founding father of the international financial architecture of the past half-century.

In early 1973, Minister of Finance Schmidt, with his French counterpart and good friend Valery Giscard D'Estaing, launched the G-5, which subsequently evolved into a G-7 and annual summits to become the steering committee for the world economy for more than three decades. That initiative paid immediate dividends when the first oil shock hit a few months later and begat historic episodes of international cooperation such as the Plaza Agreement a decade later.

In 1978, Chancellor Schmidt hosted the Bonn summit that still represents the most ambitious effort of all time to coordinate the economic policies of the major industrial nations. All participants were faithfully implementing their commitments until the second oil shock derailed the effort and the United States used the agreement to decontrol its oil prices and promote global energy adjustment. After initially asking the United States to press him to adopt Bonn's "locomotive strategy," the Chancellor turned on it for a while but reversed course after leaving office and forcefully advocated "a new Bonn summit" to stimulate global growth.

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Shortly thereafter, the Chancellor (again with Giscard) gave birth to the European Monetary System that ultimately spawned the euro, the most important currency union in history. From a German national standpoint, this was his greatest legacy: Germany now enjoys the world's largest trade surplus and a weak currency, a state of nirvana for its economy.

I had the great honor to meet with, and lecture before, the former Chancellor in June 2014, when he was already ninety-five years old. Like other distinguished senior statesmen, such as Henry Kissinger and Lee Kuan Yew, he remained deeply engaged in global events and full of creative ideas for responding to them. Intellectually acute to the end, he feared that Germany's excessive trade surpluses were generating worrisome enmity throughout Europe, and that the decline of France was leaving his country dangerously exposed at the helm of the continent. The ovations he received from the German public testified to the respect and affection with which he was showered in his later years. The world has lost a great leader and a great human being.

--C. FRED BERGSTEN Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus, Peterson Institute for International Economics