IMF Conference

Mr. David Lipton assumed the position of First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund on September 1, 2011. He served as a Special Advisor to the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund starting July 26, 2011 before assuming his duties as First Deputy Managing Director.

Before coming to the Fund, Mr. Lipton was Special Assistant to the President, and served as Senior Director for International Economic Affairs at the National Economic Council and National Security Council at the White House.

Previously, Lipton was a Managing Director at Citi, where he was Head of Global Country Risk Management. In that capacity, he chaired Citi’s Country Risk Committee, worked for the Senior Risk Officer, and advised senior management on global risk issues.

Prior to joining Citi in May 2005, he spent five years at Moore Capital Management, a global hedge fund and, before that, a year at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Lipton served in the Clinton administration at the Treasury Department from 1993 to 1998. As Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs — and before that as Assistant Secretary – Lipton helped lead the Treasury’s response to the financial crisis in Asia and the effort to modernize the international financial architecture.

Before joining the Clinton administration, Lipton was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center of Scholars.

From 1989 to 1992, he teamed up with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs then at Harvard University, working as economic advisers to the governments of Russia, Poland and Slovenia during their transitions to capitalism.

Lipton began his career with eight years on the staff of the International Monetary Fund, working on economic stabilization issues in emerging market and poor countries.

Lipton earned a Ph.d. and M.A. from Harvard University in 1982 and a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1975.

Thomas J. Sargent is an American economist who has had a seminal influence on the development of economic theory, macroeconomics, econometrics, monetary theory, and economic history. He made pioneer contributions in establishing the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic theory and policies, linking these to the theory of general equilibrium. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the “Rational Expectations” revolution and the New Classical macroeconomics. In the 1970s and 1980s, he developed through his research (part of it conducted jointly with Neil Wallace) a theory on the economic effects of macroeconomic policies based on general equilibrium and rational expectations. He conducted several historical studies that used rational expectations to explain the consequences of changes in macroeconomic policy regimes. He also helped make the theory of rational expectations statistically operational through the use of time series econometric techniques. These contributions were recognized in 2011, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his “empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy." In recent years, he has developed research on the history of fiscal policy and public debt. In addition, Professor Sargent has profoundly influenced the discipline of Economics through his role as a teacher, advisor, and mentor to generations of Ph.D. students.

Professor Sargent earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, and received the University Medal as Most Distinguished Scholar in Class of 1964. He then went on to Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1968. Since then, he has held some of the most prestigious academic positions in the United States. From 1975 to 1987, Professor Sargent was a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. In 1992, he became the David Rockefeller Professor at the University of Chicago and was Donald Lucas Professor of Economics at Stanford University from 1998 through 2002. He has also been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1987. He won the Nemmers Prize in Economics in 1997. In addition, Professor Sargent was also elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, both in 1983. Professor Sargent is the former president of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, and the Society for Economic Dynamics.

Among his books are Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice, with Robert E. Lucas Jr., University of Minnesota Press, 1981; The Big Problem of Small Change, with Francois Velde, Princeton University Press, 2002; Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, with Lars Ljungqvist, MIT Press, 2004; and Robustness, with Lars Peter Hansen, Princeton University Press, 2008.