Karel van Wolferen as a speaker

As a guest speaker for meetings and seminars:

Karel van Wolferen is an enthusiastic and dynamic speaker with extensive experience of executive briefings and other corporate meetings as well as government audiences in the United States, Japan, and across Asia and Europe. He is respected as a thought-provoking and dynamic speaker on issues that are conceptually challenging. He is best known for his political and economic talks.
    With over 30 years experience in Japan (including 16 years as East Asia correspondent for NRC Handelsblad), and after a decade of focussing on the evolving global economic structure and on transnational business, he is a superb commentator on globalisation, economic development, the institutional reasons for prevailing poverty, the political future of Europe, and the possible future course of economies in Asia that do not conform the arrangements deemed normal on both sides of the Atlantic.
    While it has become fashionable to dismiss Japan as a source of economic knowledge and China receives the attention that used to be devoted to Japan, van Wolferen shows how Japanese experience, when well understood, is in fact a very useful analytical tool with which to approach China, emerging markets in Asia, and economic development in general. A topical example of this relates to the credit crisis. The bailout of private corporations which are too large to fail without creating economic chaos is known as socialization of risk. No modern economy has arranged this as systematically and efficiently as Japan. When Europeans and Americans start down this road, they can learn much from the ways the Japanese have found to minimize inevitable negative effects.
    An engaging speaker, and equally at home as a conference chair, he cuts through much conceptual smog produced by today’s controversies and is guaranteed to stir an audience with his analyses and thought-provoking insights.

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