Paul Blustein is a CIGI senior fellow. An award- winning journalist and author, he has written extensively about international economics, trade and financial crises. Prior to joining CIGI in 2010, Paul was a staff writer for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. At CIGI, he is working on a book about the IMF’s role in the euro-zone crisis.
A native of Washington, DC, Paul attended the University of Wisconsin (B.A., history), before heading to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with an M.A. in philosophy, politics and economics in 1975. Paul began his career as a business and economics journalist shortly thereafter, returning to the United States to work as a writer at Forbes magazine. He then moved to The Wall Street Journal, where he became the newspaper’s chief economics correspondent, covering the US Federal Reserve, budget and tax policy. In 1987, Paul moved to The Washington Post and began to focus his writing on the global economy, serving five years in the paper’s Tokyo bureau and eventually becoming the paper’s international economics correspondent in 1995.
Paul is the author of The Chastening: Inside the Crisis That Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF; And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina; Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations: Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System; and Off Balance: The Travails of Institutions That Govern the Global Financial System, published by CIGI in October 2013.