27th Annual Stanford Directors' College 2022
Robert Madsen, JD ’92
Senior Economist, Hale Global Economics
Robert Madsen is a macroeconomist who advises financial institutions, corporations, and governments on international affairs. He is currently working on the nexus of QE, monetary policy, and inflation; the economic and financial implications of the Ukraine War; an institutional project on the risks of pandemics and the measures necessary to contain those risks; and, for the Ford Foundation, ESG strategies for investments and corporate governance. He also speaks frequently on topics in economics and geopolitics at Stanford University.
Between 2004 and 2015 he was a Senior Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies. He served for over a decade on the Executive Council at Unison Capital, Japan’s premier private equity group, and as a global consultant to one of the “super-major” oil companies—for which he did global and regional forecasting, analyzed economic and political shocks in some 60 different countries, and identified and measured geopolitical and economic trends around the world. He also worked as Senior Economist and Advisor at Asia Alternatives and was a retained consultant to the macroeconomic hedge fund Caxton Corporation.
From 1997 to 2013, Dr. Madsen wrote the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Japan Country Reports and contributed to that company’s analysis of China, broader East Asia, and the world. At the EIU he did extensive modeling of national debt sustainability, the future of Chinese economic development, and other quantitative topics. Before joining MIT in 2004, he was a Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia Pacific Research Center, Asia Strategist at Soros Private Funds Management, and a limited partner in the Robert M. Bass Group’s investments in Japan. His business career began as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.
Robert graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and then entered Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a master’s degree, with distinction, and a doctorate in international relations. He also holds a J.D., with distinction, from Stanford Law School and is a member of the California State Bar. Having spent over a dozen years abroad, he is fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.
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