Directors' College 2023
Robert Madsen
Senior Economist, Hale Global Economics
Robert Madsen is a macroeconomist and geopolitical strategist who advises financial institutions, corporations, and governments on international developments.
He sits on the advisory board of the Rhodes Trust’s Pandemic Policy Summit, an ongoing process designed to prepare the world to handle the next pandemic better than it did COVID. He also consults for one of the world’s largest professional services firms on problems like China’s military and economic behavior and goals, India as a potential counterpoise to Chinese influence, and other topics. In recent years he helped a $10 billion institutional investor devise its ESG strategy and conducted studies on global demographic trends and their implications for a $140 billion investment group and a prominent security consultancy.
Between 2004 and 2015 he was a Senior Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies. Over that decade he served on the Executive Council at Unison Capital, Japan’s premier private equity group; and as a consultant to one of the “super-major” oil companies, which he helped with global and regional forecasting as well as financial crisis management, fiscal and monetary policies in the major economies, Chinese politics and economics, and the future of the Eurozone. He additionally worked as Senior Economist and Advisor at Asia Alternatives, a fund-of funds, and as a retained consultant to Caxton Corporation, a macroeconomic hedge fund.
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, East Asia, and the world. He also did substantial modeling of national debt sustainability, the future of Chinese GDP growth, and other topics amenable to quantitative analysis. 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 and advisor to the Robert M. Bass Group on its investments in Japan.
Robert Madsen graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa 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. He is fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.
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