Steve Hanke

Steve Hanke (Mktg’64) has enjoyed 60 years and counting as a professor of applied economics, including a long tenure at The Johns Hopkins University, where he is founder and co-director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.

A recently published book on his charmed life, An Interview with Steve H. Hanke on His Life and Work in Economics, devotes a chapter to his time at CU Boulder. Asked why he attended the University of Colorado, Steve offered a humorous answer: “I attended because my mother enrolled me.” After arriving late for an out-of-state admission exam, he learned that he had passed—ultimately setting him on a course toward a career in academia, business, and as an advisor to eight heads of state.

As a business student, Steve was excited to major in marketing and recalled a first-rate faculty at CU Boulder’s business school, particularly professors whose influential textbooks helped shape the field. He credits what he learned from them with introducing him to ideas that would later become associated with behavioral economics and its empirical study of economic behavior.

Steve also made sure to take every real estate course offered, which led him to Professor Maurice Unger. Unger became an important role model as well as mentor and encouraged Steve to pursue graduate school. That decision eventually led to academic roles at Colorado School of Mines, the University of California, Berkeley, and The Johns Hopkins University.

Another interest began even earlier: trading. Steve shared his trading notes, “Commodity and Foreign Exchange Trading—Some Notes and High Points,” tracing that part of his career back to his childhood. He assisted his grandfather in selling eggs forward (hedging) on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and he opened his first trading account at age 14, beginning with soybeans. Decades later, in 1995, he was president of the world’s best-performing emerging market mutual fund, Toronto Trust Argentina, in Buenos Aires.

In correspondence with Tandean Rustandy Endowed Dean Vijay Khatri, Steve reflected on the role CU played in everything that followed: “You will never know how many fond memories I have of my undergraduate days at the CU Business School. I had famous professors who helped make a nobody from rural Iowa into, if you will allow me, somebody.”