David Malpass

Former U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs and former World Bank President

David Malpass served as U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs from 2017 to 2019 and World Bank President from 2019 to 2023. He is a distinguished fellow in international finance at Purdue University in Indiana and Washington, D.C. His consulting and public speaking activities focus on economics, markets, geopolitics, and leadership.

Mr. Malpass’s work has taken him to 75 countries and meetings with world leaders spanning four decades. As a strong crisis leader, his tenure at the World Bank Group provided a record $440 billion in financing to developing countries in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, energy shortages, and humanitarian crises. He led U.S. international economic policy at the Treasury, including finance, currencies, international taxation, China relations, and debt restructuring efforts. He sought to enhance national security and economic strength through his work on the 2018 FIRRMA law strengthening CFIUS, the application of sanctions, and the Financial Stability Board’s interaction with Basel III safety and soundness standards.

From 1993 to 2016, Malpass was Chief Economist, Senior Managing Director of BearStearns, and founder and president of a NYC-based economics and market research firm. Institutional investors regularly voted him a top Wall Street economist. He wrote The Thought Leaders column in Forbes for a decade. He is the author of over 100 opinion pieces on economics, markets, debt, taxes, and international relations in The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

From 1984 to 1993, Mr. Malpass served with Secretary James Baker at the Treasury and State Departments as staff director of the Joint Economic Committee and Senior Tax and Trade Analyst for the Senate Budget Committee. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Colorado College and an MBA from the University of Denver. He was a Boettcher Scholar and a National Merit Scholar. He first worked as a contract administrator, systems analyst, and CPA in Portland, Oregon. In 1983, he undertook advanced graduate work in international economics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and has studied Russian, Spanish, and French.