Maurice Obstfeld

Why organisations work with Maurice Obstfeld

• He has sat at the top of the global policy table. As IMF Chief Economist from 2015 to 2018 and a member of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2014 to 2015, he has been inside the rooms where currency, trade and crisis decisions were made.
• His scholarship is the textbook on his subject. International Economics: Theory and Policy, co-authored with Paul Krugman and Marc Melitz, is the standard text in the field; Foundations of International Macroeconomics, with Kenneth Rogoff, is the doctoral reference. Audiences are hearing from the person who wrote the book.
• He links the three dossiers most boards keep separate. Tariffs, the dollar and fiscal deficits are usually discussed in isolation. Obstfeld treats them as one operating system and shows how a move on one alters the others.
• The American Economic Association named him a Distinguished Fellow in 2023, a recognition reserved for the discipline’s most consequential contributors. The credential signals serious intellectual standing in a room where that matters.
• He is currently writing on the dollar’s standing. His 2025 work for Project Syndicate, Brookings and CEPR examines how trade policy and fiscal choices are stress-testing the dollar’s reserve role. Audiences get a current, not a retrospective, reading.

Biography highlights

• C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics, since 2019; named to the chair in 2023.
• Chief Economist (Economic Counsellor) and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund, 2015 to 2018.
• Member, US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, 2014 to 2015.
• Class of 1958 Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley.
• Co-author, International Economics: Theory and Policy (Pearson, with Krugman and Melitz) and Foundations of International Macroeconomics (MIT Press, with Rogoff).
• AEA Distinguished Fellow (2023); Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; recipient of the Tjalling Koopmans Asset Award, the John von Neumann Award, and the Bernhard Harms Prize.

Biography

The dollar’s reserve role, the global tariff regime and the independence of central banks were treated for three decades as settled architecture. They are now contested, and boards making capital allocation decisions need to understand the system, not just the cycle. Few economists are better placed to read it than Maurice Obstfeld.

Obstfeld served as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2015 to 2018, directing the institution’s Research Department through a period of trade tension, capital flow volatility and rising fiscal pressure across advanced economies. He joined the IMF directly from the US Council of Economic Advisers, where he served as a member under President Obama. Before that he held the Class of 1958 Chair in Economics at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1989 to 2023 and is now emeritus.

His scholarly contribution sits behind much of how the discipline now teaches and practises open economy macroeconomics. International Economics: Theory and Policy, co-authored with Paul Krugman and Marc Melitz, is the standard textbook in the field. Foundations of International Macroeconomics, with Kenneth Rogoff, has been the doctoral reference since 1996. The American Economic Association recognised this body of work in 2023 with the Distinguished Fellow honour.

Today he is C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, writing actively on how tariffs, fiscal deficits and pressure on central bank independence are reshaping the international monetary system. His 2025 essay “King Dollar’s Shaky Crown” for Project Syndicate, his Brookings paper on the US trade deficit, and CEPR Discussion Paper 20104 set out the case directly. The argument is that trust in the system can be destroyed quickly and rebuilt only slowly, and that capital allocators should be reading these signals now.

Key speaking topics

• The international monetary system and the future of dollar dominance
• Tariffs, trade policy and the global economy
• Exchange rates, capital flows and currency risk
• Fiscal deficits, public debt and macroeconomic policy
• Central bank independence and monetary policy
• Financial crises and global financial stability
• China, the euro area and the architecture of the global economy

Ideal for

• Boards, CIOs and treasury teams setting capital allocation policy under currency and trade uncertainty
• CFOs and investment committees in financial services, asset management and multinational corporates
• Senior policy audiences in central banks, finance ministries and sovereign wealth funds
• Economic and strategy briefings for executive committees with material cross-border exposure

Audience outcomes

• A current reading of how tariffs, fiscal policy and currency dynamics are connected as one operating system
• A clear view of the specific risks to the dollar’s reserve role and what would have to change for them to materialise
• A framework for thinking about capital allocation when the rules of the international monetary system are under political pressure
• Reference points from inside the IMF and the US Council of Economic Advisers on how policy actually moves
• Citable language and named arguments senior leaders can carry back into their own board discussions