Reza Moghadam

Reza Moghadam is a British-Iranian economist who has been Vice-Chairman for Global Capital Markets at Morgan Stanley since October 2014. Until July 2014, he was the International Monetary Fund’s front man for dealing with European policy makers and institutions during the eurozone crisis. During his twenty-year career at the IMF he dealt first-hand with many crises—in emerging markets, in the advanced countries of the Eurozone and with the Fund’s own restructuring.

The eldest of three children, Reza Moghadam was born in Borojerd in Western Iran on 4 May 1962 and raised in Tehran. His family moved to London when the Islamic revolution broke out in 1979. In 1982 he was admitted to Oxford University where he studied mathematics at Magdalen College. While there, he was elected president of the student union (Junior Common Room) and created and ran the first Magdalen College Arts Festival. Following a master's degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science, he went on to the University of Warwick for his PhD in Economics; his doctoral thesis was on wage determination. He is a passionate cyclist and a supporter of the Chelsea Football Club.

While studying for his PhD, Moghadam taught economics at the Universities of Warwick as well as in London and Bristol. During this time he worked with Colin Carter on the renovation of the LSE’s Phillips Machine, a 60-year-old hydraulic model of the British economy used to demonstrate visually the workings of open economy macroeconomic theory. The machine is now on permanent display at the London Science Museum. From 1990 to 1992, he worked as an Economist for Coopers and Lybrand, focusing on labor market, regulatory and privatization issues.

Moghadam joined the IMF in 1992 in its elite Economist Program. Moghadam started in the European Department, where he got to deal with the fall-out from the collapse of the communist states, German reunification, and the implosion of the exchange-rate mechanism. He then transferred to the Asia and Pacific Department in 1997 just as Thailand devalued its currency, the first domino of the Asian Crisis. As the IMF resident representative in Bangkok, he was the IMF’s man on the ground helping ensure the flow of international assistance to Thailand and advising the government. Returning to IMF headquarters in Washington in 2000, Moghadam headed the missions to Thailand and Indonesia before turning to new crises in Argentina, Brazil and Turkey – in his capacity as adviser to Anne Krueger, then the IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director. In 2003, Moghadam became Turkey mission chief at a time when its program was off track, inflation out of control and a newly- elected government was trying to find its feet in the build-up to war in Iraq. Moghadam’s re-making of the programme laid the foundation for the country’s subsequent economic success. Recalling those years, Kemal Dervis, the then finance minister of Turkey, recently referred to Reza Moghadam as “one of the top economists in the world” and a "sometimes tough negotiator".

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