Matthew C. Klein

My work is read across the world by central bankers, chief economists, academics, policymakers, and investors.

I won the 2014 Eppy Award for “Best Online Infographics on a Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors and over” for my examination of U.S. mortality statistics and I won the 2021 Lionel Gelber Prize for my book Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace (Yale, 2020) with Michael Pettis.

I ended up in this field thanks to an internship doing global macro investment research at Bridgewater Associates in the summer of 2008. Once I started seeing how the world economy fit together, I was hooked and wanted to know more.

Then the financial crisis hit. That event—and its aftermath—made it clear how we are all affected by forces most of us never see or understand. It’s been my mission in life ever since to figure out the interlocking systems of trade and finance that cause bubbles, busts, and everything in between.

I ended up moving to the Council on Foreign Relations to research economic and financial history. After a couple of years there I got my first journalism job, which was an internship at the Economist. From there I moved to Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and most recently Barron’s, where I was the Economics Commentator.