Dr. Simon Johnson
Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT, Cambridge, MA
Prof. Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a co-founder of BaselineScenario.com (a widely cited website on the global economy), and a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. Prof. Johnson is a weekly contributor to NYT.com's Economix, has a monthly column with Project Syndicate that runs in publications around the world, and has published high impact opinion pieces recently in The Atlantic, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, and The Financial Times, among other places. In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as contributing business editor.
Professor Johnson is the co-author, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers, a major new assessment of the US financial sector, to be published by Pantheon in March 2010. Johnson and Kwak argue that the deregulation of banking since the Reagan Revolution has produced great economic danger. The financial crisis and generous government bailouts of 2008-09 only worsened the underlying problems. Unless the biggest banks are reined in – and become small enough to fail – we are headed for serious trouble.
From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Prof. Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's Economic Counselor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. He is a co-director of the NBER Africa Project, and works with non-profits and think tanks around the world.
Professor Johnson is an expert on financial and economic crises. As an academic, in policy roles, and with the private sector, he has worked for over 20 years on crisis prevention and economic recovery around the world.