Then: Bank Executive and Professor of Accounting

Later: Governor of the National Bank of Romania

In 1975, Mugur Isarescu crossed the Iron Curtain to attend a Seminar session on International Economic Policies. Fifteen years later, as Romania’s communist regime fell, Isarescu became governor of Romania’s national bank. Massive reforms were needed. “Everything I knew about Western economic systems I had firstly learned at the Salzburg Seminar,” Isarescu says, adding that the Seminar proved to be “absolutely crucial” to his efforts to transform Romania’s economy into a free-market system. Isarescu would go on to keep Romania’s banking system afloat during the 2008 financial crisis and is today the world’s longest serving governor of a central bank.