Martin Baily

Why organisations work with Martin Baily

• He has held the chair that briefs a US president on the economy. Few speakers can describe how macro policy, financial regulation and productivity actually intersect from inside that seat.
• His current Brookings work with Federal Reserve Board economists on generative AI as a general-purpose technology gives boards a sober, evidence-led read on the productivity case, distinct from vendor and consultancy framing.
• Twenty years inside the McKinsey Global Institute on cross-country productivity research means he can tell a European board how its growth problem differs from the US one, with the data to back it.
• As co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative and a member of the Squam Lake Group, he reads the financial regulation agenda the way an operator does, not the way a lobbyist does.
• His written record, from “Innovation and the Productivity Crisis” to “Transforming the European Economy”, gives clients a referenceable thesis, not a deck.

Biography highlights

• Chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisers, 1999 to 2001, and Cabinet member under President Bill Clinton.
• Senior Fellow Emeritus, Brookings Institution; Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in Economic Policy Development.
• Co-author, “Transforming the European Economy” (Peterson Institute, 2004), Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2005.
• Co-author, “Innovation and the Productivity Crisis” (Brookings Institution Press, 1988).
• Principal, McKinsey & Company’s Global Institute (1996 to 1999); senior advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute since 2002.
• Co-chair, Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative, Bipartisan Policy Center; senior advisor, Albright Stonebridge Group.

Biography

Productivity growth is the variable that decides whether wages can rise, debt is sustainable, and capital earns a return. It has been weak across most advanced economies for two decades, and the explanation is contested. Martin Baily has spent his career inside that contest, from the White House, from McKinsey’s Global Institute, and from Brookings.

He chaired President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1999 to 2001 and sat on the Council from 1994. He holds the Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in Economic Policy Development at Brookings and is a senior advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute, where he was a principal in the late 1990s during the Institute’s foundational comparative productivity work.

His co-authored books, “Innovation and the Productivity Crisis” with Alok Chakrabarti and “Transforming the European Economy” with Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, set out a consistent thesis: productivity weakness is rarely a single mechanical problem; it is the cumulative drag of weak innovation diffusion, protected incumbents and policy that subsidises stasis. The European book was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2005.

Recent work at Brookings, with Federal Reserve Board economists David Byrne and Eugenio Soto and Brookings colleague Aidan Kane, examines whether generative AI qualifies as a general-purpose technology and where, in finance and other sectors, the productivity dividend will actually land. He co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative and sits in the Squam Lake Group of financial economists who write on systemic risk and reform.

Key speaking topics

• US and global productivity growth
• Financial regulation and systemic risk
• The macroeconomic case for generative AI
• US economic policy and the Federal budget outlook
• European competitiveness and structural reform
• Social Security and pension reform

Ideal for

• Boards and audit committees pricing financial regulation and macro risk into strategy
• CFOs and chief economists at banks, insurers and asset managers
• Senior policy and government affairs leadership tracking US economic policy
• Strategy and transformation leaders building the AI productivity business case

Audience outcomes

• A clear read on where productivity growth is actually coming from, and where it is not
• A grounded view on which generative AI productivity claims are supported by evidence and which are not
• An informed perspective on the live US financial regulatory agenda and its implications for capital and risk
• A comparative frame for European versus US growth performance and the policies that move it