Influential people in the financial world: Who actually is Mario Draghi

Not everyone can boast a resume like Mario Draghi’s: The Italian has made it from one influential position to the next and is probably one of the most successful financial experts in Europe.

First Italian PhD student at MIT

Mario Draghi was born in Rome in 1947. In the spirit of his father, who worked at the Italian central bank Banca d’Italia, he went to MIT after completing his undergraduate studies at the Sapienza Università di Roma, where he became the first Italian student to earn a doctorate in economics. In the USA he learned and researched from and with the best – his lecturers included Franco Modigliani, a later winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Stanley Fischer, the later head of the Israeli Central Bank.

After his studies, Draghi followed in the footsteps of Modigliani and Fischer and taught as a professor of economics at the universities of Trento, Padua, Venice and Florence in the 1970s and 1980s. He also worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC in the 1980s

Draghi becomes “Super Mario” at the turn of the millennium

Draghi continued from 1991 to 2001 as head of the Italian Ministry of Finance and as head of a national committee for privatization. During these years, the then 50-year-old ensured the reduction of Italian national debt, a stabilization of interest rates and a good exchange rate, which meant that Italy qualified for entry into the euro area in 1999. With this development and a reform of Italian financial institutions, Draghi secured the nickname “Super Mario”.

His success in the Ministry of Finance qualified the Italian for a position at Goldman Sachs International in London, where he served as Vice Chairman and Managing Director from 2002 to 2005. A year later he returned to Italy and took over the management of the Banca d’Italia, which automatically placed him in the management of the European Central Bank (ECB). In the 00s, Draghi also became chairman of the Financial Stability Forum, which was renamed the Financial Stability Board in 2008 in the context of the financial crisis. This is an institution with great regulatory power.

Draghi was head of the ECB and briefly even Italy’s prime minister

In 2011, Draghi finally became head of the ECB. He held this post for the usual term of eight years. As ECB President, he confidently said in 2012 that “the ECB is prepared to do everything to preserve the euro” and shaped the European one monetary policy authoritative. After Christine Lagarde After finally taking over his post at the top of the ECB in 2019, Draghi turned to other political issues and won the presidential election in Italy in 2021. However, because the country found itself in crisis a short time later – due, among other things, to the corona pandemic – the now almost 80-year-old resigned from his post in 2022.

Editorial team finanzen.net

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