Daniel Lacalle

Why organisations work with Daniel Lacalle

• He is one of the few macro voices who has run institutional capital at Citadel and PIMCO, which means his read on central banks, rates and currencies is shaped by position-taking, not commentary.
• His work on monetary policy, set out in Escape from the Central Bank Trap, gives boards a specific framework for understanding why stimulus produces weaker growth and persistent inflation rather than the recovery policymakers promise.
• The Energy World Is Flat anticipated the structural shift in oil, gas and commodity markets that now sits at the centre of every industrial capital plan, energy security review and net zero financing decision.
• He sits across the macro and the energy desk in a way almost no other economist on the speaking circuit does, which matters for any board with significant exposure to commodities, infrastructure or sovereign risk.
• A regular voice on CNBC, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the World Economic Forum Agenda, so the analysis a room hears in private is the analysis institutional investors are pricing in public.

Biography highlights

• Chief Economist at Tressis SV; former Vice President at PIMCO and portfolio manager at Citadel and Ecofin Limited.
• Professor of Global Economics at IE Business School and lecturer at the London School of Economics.
• Author of Life in the Financial Markets (Wiley), The Energy World Is Flat (Wiley), Escape from the Central Bank Trap (Business Expert Press) and Freedom or Equality (Post Hill Press).
• Ranked among the world’s twenty most influential economists by Richtopia in 2016, 2017 and 2019, and placed fifth in 2020.
• Voted Top 3 in the Thomson Reuters Extel Survey for five consecutive years across generalist, oil and electricity categories.
• Regular contributor to CNBC, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and the World Economic Forum Agenda, and weekly columnist for El Español.

Biography

Central banks have spent fifteen years running the largest monetary experiment in modern history. Boards now have to allocate capital inside the consequences. Daniel Lacalle has spent his career on the side of the trade where being wrong about the macro has a price, first at Citadel, then at Ecofin, then as Vice President at PIMCO.

That experience sits underneath the books. Escape from the Central Bank Trap argues that easy money produces fragile balance sheets, asset inflation and weaker real growth, not the recovery policymakers describe. The Energy World Is Flat, written before the shale revolution remade global oil markets, set out why the assumptions priced into long-dated energy contracts no longer held. Both have moved from contrarian reading to mainstream reference inside investment committees.

Since 2015 he has been Chief Economist at Tressis SV and a professor of global economics at IE Business School, with lecturing roles at the London School of Economics and IEB. His weekly commentary in El Español, his monthly slots on CNBC and Bloomberg, and his contributions to the World Economic Forum Agenda give boards a continuous read on rates, currencies, sovereign debt and energy that lines up with how institutional capital is actually positioned.

The reason serious organisations book him is narrower than the topic list suggests. He is one of a small number of speakers who can sit across monetary policy and energy markets at the same time, with the credibility of having priced both inside a fund. For any board with material exposure to commodities, sovereign risk, or the cost of capital, that is the conversation that matters.

Key speaking topics

• Monetary policy and central bank intervention
• Inflation, currencies and the cost of capital
• Global energy markets and security of supply
• Sovereign debt and fiscal sustainability
• Macroeconomic risk and capital allocation
• Geopolitics and global financial markets

Ideal for

• Boards, investment committees and CFOs reviewing capital allocation under rate and currency volatility
• Energy, utilities and industrial leadership teams managing commodity exposure and the economics of the energy transition
• Banking, asset management and family office audiences setting macro positioning
• Sovereign and policy audiences working on fiscal, monetary and energy questions

Audience outcomes

• A direct read on what current central bank policy implies for inflation, rates and the real cost of capital over a multi-year horizon
• A defensible view of structural conditions in global oil, gas and power markets, and what they mean for industrial investment
• A sharper sense of where sovereign and currency risk is being mispriced, and what that means for cross-border exposure
• The macro framing institutional investors are actually using, expressed in language a board can act on