Fabrizio Saccomanni

Fabrizio Saccomanni was a distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from January 2015 to November 2017. He is vice president of the International Affairs Institute (IAI), the most influential Italian foreign policy think tank. He is also senior fellow of the School of European Political Economy at LUISS University in Rome, where he taught a course on European monetary policy; since September 2014 he has been Visiting Professor in Practice at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has given a number of seminars on European monetary and economic issues.

Fabrizio Saccomanni was a central banker for most of his professional career until he was appointed minister of economy and finance in the Italian government from April 2013 to February 2014, when the Cabinet of Enrico Letta resigned. Prior to the Cabinet appointment, he had been senior deputy governor (director general) of the Bank of Italy from October 2006 to April 2013. In that capacity he was member of the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel and alternate to the governor in the governing council of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. From February 2003 to October 2006 he was vice president for risk management at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London.

Saccomanni joined the Bank of Italy in 1967 and was seconded to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington from 1970 to 1975, as an economist in the exchange and trade department and subsequently in the office of the Italian executive director. Upon his return to the Bank of Italy, he served as head of the research department and in the foreign department from 1984 to 1997, and as managing director for international affairs from 1997 to 2003. During this period he acquired a deep expertise in the working of international financial and foreign exchange markets and represented the Bank of Italy in a number of committees dealing with monetary and financial cooperation at the BIS, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the IMF, and within the G-7 and the G-10. He was a member of the G-7 Study Group on Foreign Exchange Market Intervention (1984–85) and chairman of the Gold and Foreign Exchange Committee at the BIS (1988–91). Since then, he has been a member of the Italian delegation at meetings of the International Monetary and Financial Committee of the IMF, the Development Committee of the World Bank, and of the G-20, initially as one of the deputies and lately as minister of finance.

A deeply committed Europeanist, Saccomanni took part in the process of European monetary unification from the beginning, first in the Expert Group on foreign exchange markets within the Committee of Governors of the Central Banks of the European Union and subsequently in the European Monetary Institute (the precursor of the ECB), where he was chairman of the Foreign Exchange Policy Committee from 1992 to 1998, and later as a member of the Economic and Financial Committee of the European Union. In this period he was involved in preparation of the Delors Report on Economic and Monetary Union and in the drafting of the guidelines for the conduct of monetary and foreign exchange operations by the ECB, as well as in the negotiations on the Convergence Reports required for the establishment of the ECB and the participation of EU members in the euro. As senior deputy governor of the Bank of Italy since 2006, he participated in the implementation of the ECB monetary policy, particularly in the elaboration of the appropriate response to the global financial crisis. He also participated in 2012 in the High Level Working Group of the ECB on the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism in the context of the banking union project. As minister of finance of Italy, he took part in 2013 in the negotiations in the ECOFIN Council of the European Union on the creation of the second pillar of the banking union, the Single Resolution Mechanism to deal with banking crises.

Fabrizio Saccomanni holds a MS degree in economics and business from Bocconi University in Milan and did postgraduate studies in monetary and international economics at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous articles on international monetary and financial issues and of the book Managing International Financial Instability (Edward Elgar, 2008). He is also coeditor of The International Monetary System, with Peter B. Kenen and Francesco Papadia (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and An Ocean Apart? Comparing Transatlantic Responses to the Financial Crisis, with Jean Pisany-Ferry and Adam S. Posen (Bruegel/Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011).