Prof. Simon Johnson PhD '89
Professor, Global Economics & Management
MIT Sloan School of Management
Speaker/Panelist 2018
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, where he is also head of the Global Economics and Management group and chair of the Sloan Fellows MBA Program Committee. He cofounded and currently leads the popular Global Entrepreneurship Lab course. He also works closely with Joi Ito, head of MIT’s Media Lab, on the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI). Specifically, Prof. Johnson supervises research projects related to blockchain technology and co-teaches a course on this fast-developing business sector.
Prof. Johnson is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com, and a member since inception of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. In July 2014, he joined the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR); he chairs the recently formed Global Vulnerabilities Working Group.
Prof. Johnson has been a member of the private sector Systemic Risk Council since it was founded in 2012. From 2009 to 2015, he was a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers. In March 2016, he was the third Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Central Bank of Barbados.
Over the past decade, he has published more than 300 high impact pieces in the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Republic, BusinessWeek, the Huffington Post, the Financial Times, and Project Syndicate. His book, 13 Bankers: the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (with James Kwak), was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the mostly highly regarded books on the financial crisis. Their follow-up book on U.S. fiscal policy, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters for You, won praise across the political spectrum.
Prof. Johnson holds a BA in economics and politics from the University of Oxford, an MA in economics from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in economics from MIT.