Lorenzo Bini Smaghi

Who is Lorenzo Bini Smaghi?

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi is an Italian economist who is currently Chairman of Snam, an Italian listed company, and Non-Executive Director of Morgan Stanley International. He is Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Senior Research Fellow at Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome. He has been a Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank from June 2005 to November 2011. In the ECB Executive Board he was responsible for international and European relations and for the legal department of the Bank and for its administration, including the building of a new site for the ECB in the Frankfurt Grossmarkthalle.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi grew up in Brussels, acquiring a knowledge of foreign languages at an early age. In 1974 he graduated from the Lycée Français de Bruxelles. In 1978 he graduated in Economics from the Université Catholique de Louvain. With a scholarship from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, in 1980 he received a master's degree in Economics from the University of Southern California; and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1988.

Before joining the ECB, he was Director General for International Financial Relations of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance. His earlier appointments include: Deputy Director-General Research of the ECB, Head of the Policy Division of the European Monetary Institute and Head of the Exchange Rate and International Trade Division of the Research Department of Banca d’Italia. He has published extensively in monetary and international economics.