Dambisa Moyo
Boards are being asked to make capital decisions in a world where the rules of globalisation no longer hold. Sanctions, supply-chain reorganisation, China exposure, energy transition costs and chronic political risk now sit on the same agenda as quarterly earnings. The leaders who get this right are the ones who can read the global economy as a single system, not a series of headlines.
Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born macroeconomist, four-time New York Times bestselling author and Chair of the Economic Club of New York who serves on the boards of Chevron, Starbucks, and Condé Nast and helps investors and corporate leaders decide where to allocate capital in a fracturing global economy.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dambisa Moyo
- Few macroeconomists hold simultaneous directorships at companies of the scale of Chevron, Starbucks, and Condé Nast. From that seat she has spent two decades answering the question now on every board’s table: where the next dollar goes when the old growth assumptions stop working.
- Her four New York Times bestsellers gave decision-makers a vocabulary for the questions that now dominate board agendas: aid dependency, the West’s structural decline, China’s resource strategy, the failure of democratic capitalism to deliver growth, and how boards themselves should function.
- As Chair of the Economic Club of New York, she convenes the forum where Fed chairs, heads of state, and Fortune 500 CEOs publicly debate the economy. That puts her at the centre of the conversations her clients are trying to anticipate.
- She is a serving member of the House of Lords as Baroness Moyo of Knightsbridge, which gives her a working line of sight into how policy, regulation, and geopolitics actually move.
- Her training is unusually broad for a public macro voice: a DPhil in Economics from Oxford, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy, plus eight years inside Goldman Sachs research. Audiences get a practitioner, not a commentator.
Biography highlights
- DPhil in Economics, St Antony’s College, Oxford; MPA, Harvard Kennedy School
- Eight years at Goldman Sachs in research; two years at the World Bank
- Chair of the Economic Club of New York; current board director at Chevron, Condé Nast, and Starbucks; member of the Oxford University Endowment Investment Committee; trustee of the National Geographic Society
- Prior public-company boards include Barclays, SABMiller, Barrick Gold, 3M, and Seagate Technology
- Life peer in the United Kingdom House of Lords as Baroness Moyo of Knightsbridge (created 2022)
- Author of Dead Aid, How the West Was Lost, Winner Take All, Edge of Chaos, and How Boards Work; recipient of the Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award (2013) and TIME 100 (2009)
Biography
The argument that ran through forty years of cheap goods, cheap money and integrated supply chains has stopped working. Capital allocators now have to price geopolitics into every decision, and most of the management vocabulary they grew up with was built for a different world. Dambisa Moyo’s career has been spent on exactly this fault line.
Her first book, Dead Aid, took on the development consensus and argued that aid dependency was choking African growth. How the West Was Lost and Winner Take All extended the argument into the structural decline of advanced economies and China’s strategic accumulation of commodities. Edge of Chaos asked whether liberal democracies can still deliver economic growth at all. The books are not adjacent to her speaking; they are the speaking.
The credentials behind the argument are unusual. A DPhil in Economics from Oxford and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy, eight years inside Goldman Sachs research, simultaneous directorships at Chevron, Condé Nast, and Starbucks, a seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Moyo of Knightsbridge, and, since 2026, the chair of the Economic Club of New York. The combination is rare because it spans rooms that usually do not talk to each other: the academy, the trading floor, the boardroom, and the forum where they meet in public.
What makes her useful in a leadership setting is that she has had to act on her own analysis. The question of how to allocate capital across China exposure, energy transition timelines and political risk is not a thought experiment for her; it is the agenda of the boards she sits on. How Boards Work, her most recent book, was written from that seat.
Key speaking topics
- Global macroeconomics and capital allocation
- Geopolitics and the future of globalisation
- China and the contest for resources
- Democracy, governance and economic growth
- Energy transition and the cost of capital
- Corporate governance and how boards should function
- Emerging markets and frontier investment
Ideal for
- Boards and investment committees pricing geopolitical and macro risk into capital decisions
- CEOs, CFOs and Chief Strategy Officers reassessing China exposure, supply chain footprint and growth assumptions
- Asset managers, family offices and institutional investors setting long-horizon allocation strategy
- Senior leadership offsites where the economic and geopolitical context for the next plan is the agenda
Audience outcomes
- A clearer reading of how geopolitical fracture, sanctions regimes and energy transition are reshaping the cost of capital
- A defensible view on China’s resource strategy and what it implies for Western corporates and investors
- A working framework for how boards should govern in a more politicised, slower-growth global economy
- Confidence to challenge consensus assumptions about globalisation, growth and aid that no longer hold
Talks
A working map of the macro forces now driving capital decisions, from inflation dynamics to the unwinding of cheap globalisation.
Key takeaways:
- How to read inflation, rates and growth as a single system rather than separate stories
- The forces that have replaced cheap labour and cheap money as the binding constraints on capital
- Practical implications for board-level allocation and corporate strategy
What changes for capital allocators when supply chains, sanctions and political alignment become first-order variables.
Key takeaways:
- Where geopolitical fracture is creating new investable themes and where it is destroying them
- How to think about China exposure, friend-shoring and resource security in a single frame
- The portfolio and corporate decisions that follow
Drawn from How Boards Work, a directors’ view of what boards now have to do that they were not built to do.
Key takeaways:
- The questions today’s boards have to answer that were not on the agenda ten years ago
- How board composition, cadence and information flow have to change
- What separates boards that govern from boards that approve