David M. Smick, Sr. is an American global macroeconomic strategist, magazine publisher, best-selling author, and documentary filmmaker. He is the chairman and CEO of Johnson Smick International, a global strategic advisory firm in Washington, D.C. where he is in partnership with former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Manuel H. Johnson. [1] The firm provides strategic advice to some of the world's most successful investors. Smick is a registered independent.
Smick grew up in a blue collar neighborhood in Baltimore.
In 1975, Smick started working as a member of the minority policy staff of the United States Senate. From 1978 to 1984, he served as chief of staff to a member of the United States House of Representatives. [2]
Beginning in 1985, Smick co-organized a series of distinguished global monetary conferences, sponsored by the U.S. congressional leadership, involving many of the industrialized world's finance ministers, central bankers, and leading foreign exchange experts. The conferences took place over the course of a decade in Tokyo, New York, Washington, Frankfurt, Vienna and Zurich. The first conference set the stage for the official 1985 Plaza Accord, the G5 agreement to bring down the value of the dollar during heightened trade tensions. Washington Post correspondent Hobart Rowen wrote that the conference was an important “final nail in the coffin of the pure floating exchange rate system.”
Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), a conference co-sponsor, at a later event in Zurich, floated the idea of developing-world debt restructuring which, within several years, led to the issuance of the popular Brady Bonds. Those bonds helped lead to a developing world economic rebound.
David Smick is the founder (1987), publisher, and editor of the distinguished quarterly magazine The International Economy.
David Smick has written op-ed pieces for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, CNBC, The Charlie Rose Show, and Bloomberg News.
In 2020 (with help from Academy Award-winning director Barry Levinson who served as executive producer), Smick wrote and directed Stars and Strife, a full-length documentary that predicted a coming tidal wave of political, social, and economic division in America. Tom Friedman of the New York Times said of the film: "Incredible work." Stars and Strife was acquired by Lionsgate and premiered on Starz on September 21, 2020. Smick's 2024 documentary America's Burning , soon to be released, features a cast that includes James Carville, Leon Panetta, James Baker, Katherine Gehl, Larry Summers, Stan Druckenmiller, Arthur C. Brooks, Rahm Emanuel, Ian Bremmer, Hawk Newsome, and many others. The film is executive produced by Michael Douglas and Barry Levinson, and narrated by Michael Douglas. David Ignatius of the Washington Post watched an early version of the film and called it "incredibly powerful."
Smick's first book, The World Is Curved (2008) was described by David Brooks of the New York Times as "astonishingly prescient." [3] The book discussed the financial perils of globalization and questioned whether the Wall Street banks were in full understanding of the values of the assets on their balance sheets. The book arrived as the 2007–2008 financial crisis was hitting. President Bill Clinton called it "one of the three best books on the financial crisis." Smick's second bestseller, The Great Equalizer: How Main Street Capitalism Can Create an Economy for Everyone, argues that a ruthless corporate elite with deep political connections is making American capitalism less efficient, producing a dangerous decline in social mobility.
Smick is married and has three children and four grandchildren.
A liquidity trap is a situation, described in Keynesian economics, in which, "after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers holding cash rather than holding a debt which yields so low a rate of interest."
Market fundamentalism, also known as free-market fundamentalism, is a term applied to a strong belief in the ability of unregulated laissez-faire or free-market capitalist policies to solve most economic and social problems. It is often used as pejorative by critics of said beliefs.
Anatole Kaletsky is an economist and journalist based in the United Kingdom. He has written since 1976 for The Economist, The Financial Times and The Times of London before joining Reuters and The International Herald Tribune in 2012. He has been named Newspaper Commentator of the Year in the BBC's What the Papers Say awards, and has twice received the British Press Award for Specialist Writer of the Year.
William Harold Greider was an American journalist and author who wrote primarily about economics.
Henry "Hank" Merritt Paulson Jr. is an American investment banker and financier who served as the 74th United States Secretary of the Treasury from 2006 to 2009. Prior to his role in the Department of the Treasury, Paulson was the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of major investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Raghuram Govind Rajan is an Indian economist and the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Between 2003 and 2006 he was Chief Economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund. From September 2013 through September 2016 he was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. In 2015, during his tenure at the RBI, he became the Vice-Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements.
Susan Strange was a British political economist, author, and journalist who was "almost single-handedly responsible for creating international political economy." Notable publications include Sterling and British Policy (1971), Casino Capitalism (1986), States and Markets (1988), The Retreat of the State (1996), and Mad Money (1998).
Per Anders Åslund is a Swedish economist and former Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is also a chairman of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE).
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is a non-fiction book by Marc Levinson charting the historic rise of the intermodal container and how it changed the economic landscape of the global economy. The New York Times called it "a smart, engaging book".
Allan H. Meltzer was an American economist and Allan H. Meltzer Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and Institute for Politics and Strategy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Meltzer specialized on studying monetary policy and the US Federal Reserve System, and authored several academic papers and books on the development and applications of monetary policy, and about the history of central banking in the US. Together with Karl Brunner, he created the Shadow Open Market Committee: a monetarist council that deeply criticized the Federal Open Market Committee.
Financialization is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.
Raymond W. Baker is an American businessman, scholar, author, and "authority on financial crime." He is the founder and president of Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, DC working to curtail illicit financial flows.
Anwar M. Shaikh is a Pakistani American heterodox economist in the tradition of classical political economy and Marxian economics.
Naked Capitalism is a liberal American group blog. Susan Webber, the principal of Aurora Advisors Incorporated, a management-consulting firm based in New York City, launched the site in late 2006, using the pen name Yves Smith. She focused on finance and economic news and analysis, with an emphasis on legal and ethical issues of the banking industry and the mortgage foreclosure process, the worldwide effects of the banking crisis of 2008, the 2007–2012 global financial crisis, and its aftermath. The site became one of the most highly frequented financial blogs on the Internet and has published a number of noted exposés since.
The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? is a 2010 non-fiction book by Ian Bremmer, that discusses the rise of state capitalism, a system in which governments dominate local economies through ownership of market-dominant companies and large pools of excess capital, using them for political gain. This trend, Bremmer argues, challenges America's economic strength and the conduct of free markets everywhere.
The 2007–2008 financial crisis, or the global financial crisis (GFC), was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. Predatory lending in the form of subprime mortgages targeting low-income homebuyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, a continuous buildup of toxic assets within banks, and the bursting of the United States housing bubble culminated in a "perfect storm", which led to the Great Recession.
Martin Ford is an American futurist and author focusing on artificial intelligence and robotics, and the impact of these technologies on the job market, economy and society.
Liviu Voinea has been Alternate Executive Director at the World Bank since March 1st, 2024. Between august 2019 and august 2023 he was Romania's representative to the International Monetary Fund and Senior Advisor to the IMF Executive Director. In this capacity he was a member of the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund. He also represented Montenegro to the IMF.
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy is a 2010 book by Indian economist Raghuram Rajan on the underlying causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and the structural weaknesses present in the world economy. It won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award in 2010.
The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy is a book written by David M. Smick, a financial market consultant, non-fiction author, and Chairman and CEO in the consultancy company of Johnson Smick International (JSI). This book opposes the views of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Smick considers the potential negative ramifications of a constantly fluctuating global economy and analyzes possible solutions to these challenges.
In his astonishingly prescient book, "The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy," David M. Smick argues ...
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