Olivier Blanchard is the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A citizen of France, Blanchard has spent most of his professional life in the United States. After obtaining his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, and returned to MIT in 1982. He was chair of the economics department from 1998 to 2003. In 2008, he took a leave of absence to be the Econom-ic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund where he stayed until 2015. He then joined the Peterson Institute for Interna-tional Economics.  Dr Blanchard is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary and fiscal policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries, to the nature of the Great Financial Cri-sis. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organ-izations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the under-graduate level. He is a fellow and former Council member of the Econometric Socie-ty, a past president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.