Barry Julian Eichengreen (born 1952) is an American economist and economic historian who is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. Eichengreen is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Barry Eichengreen was born to German-Jewish parents Dan and Lucille Eichengreen in 1952. His mother was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States after World War II, meeting her husband in New York. She never spoke to her sons about her experiences during the Holocaust, and only informed them that she was, in fact, a Holocaust survivor when they went off to college. "They both studied history—one has a history degree—they know what transpired. But we don't talk about it."

Eichengreen earned a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in 1974. He followed this with an M.A. in economics, an M.Phil. in economics, an M.A. in history, and a Ph.D. in economics, all from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Eichengreen has done research and published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system. He was a senior policy advisor to the International Monetary Fund in 1997 and 1998, although he has since been critical of the IMF. In 1997, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Eichengreen's best known work is the book Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939, published by Oxford University Press in 1992.

In his own book on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke summarized Eichengreen's thesis as follows:

... [T]he proximate cause of the world depression was a structurally flawed and poorly managed international gold standard... For a variety of reasons, including among others a desire of the Federal Reserve to curb the US stock market boom, monetary policy in several major countries turned contractionary in the late 1920s—a contraction that was transmitted worldwide by the gold standard. What was initially a mild deflationary process began to snowball when the banking and currency crises of 1931 instigated an international "scramble for gold". Sterilization of gold inflows by surplus countries [the USA and France], substitution of gold for foreign exchange reserves, and runs on commercial banks all led to increases in the gold backing of money, and consequently to sharp unintended declines in national money supplies. Monetary contractions in turn were strongly associated with falling prices, output and employment. Effective international cooperation could in principle have permitted a worldwide monetary expansion despite gold standard constraints, but disputes over World War I reparations and war debts, and the insularity and inexperience of the Federal Reserve, among other factors, prevented this outcome. As a result, individual countries were able to escape the deflationary vortex only by unilaterally abandoning the gold standard and re-establishing domestic monetary stability, a process that dragged on in a halting and uncoordinated manner until France and the other Gold Bloc countries finally left gold in 1936.

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