Rubenstein Lecture Gita Gopinath Harvard Economics Professor Former Imf

TITLE: Rubenstein Lecture | Gita Gopinath, Harvard Economics Professor, former IMF CHANNEL: Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy DATE: 2026-04-15 ---TRANSCRIPT--- We are thrilled to be here today. My name is Manoj Mohanan and I’m the interim dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke. This lecture is made possible by the support of David M Rubenstein. We thank him for his long time engagement with Duke and Sanford, and for creating this lecture series in particular, and a special thanks to our co-sponsors for today’s lecture, the Department of Economics at Duke. Steve Medina, thank you so much for your collaboration on this event. And now it’s my pleasure to introduce our speakers and get our program underway. First, our distinguished guest, Doctor Gita Gopinath, is the Gregory and Anna Coffey Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research focuses on international finance and macroeconomics. And she’s a leading voice on dollar dominance, exchange rates, trade, investment, international financial crises, monetary policy and debt. That’s a long list from 2022 to 2025. She served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF. That’s not the Tom cruise version. So she was the official number two at the IMF. And in that role, she oversaw the work of senior staff, represented the IMF at multilateral forums, maintaining high level contacts with member governments and board members. She also led the World Fund’s work on surveillance and oversaw large IMF programs, such as those for Argentina and Ukraine. Miss Gold Peanuts, previously served as the chief economist of IMF from 2019 to 2022. And as chief economist, she helmed 13 releases of the World Economic Outlook, which included forecasts of the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on global economy. Her research is widely cited and has been published in many top tier journals in economics. We’re very pleased also to be joined by David Rubenstein, who is a Duke alumnus, 1970 graduate of Duke. And he’s also the co-founder and cochairman of the Carlyle Group. Duke David then went on to the University of Chicago’s law school, where he got his law degree in 1973. He’s a Baltimore native and chairman, CEO, and principal owner of Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles. They just had a great victory yesterday. Mr. Rubenstein is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and chairman of many educational and nonprofit boards. He’s an original signing of the Giving Pledge and the host of the David Rubenstein Show, The Bloomberg Welt with David Rubenstein, longevity with David Rubenstein, and Iconic America. Our stories and symbols are symbols and stories, but David Rubenstein. So with that intro, we look forward to the conversation.

Thank you, both of you. Thank you very much. And thank you all for coming. So thank you very much for coming. So you are a professor at the Duke of the North, Harvard. So that’s fine. Let’s talk about your background for a moment. Where did you grow up? I grew up in India. Okay. And then you say, as a little girl, you wanted to be an economist? Absolutely not. So what do you want to be? I when I was, this was back in India in, 1989, and I was figuring out what to do with my life. And at that time, no Indian kid says they want to be an economist. I mean, that was like a failure, right? You wanted to be an engineer or a doctor was what was the standard path to go? My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to try something else, which is to join the Indian Administrative Service, which is the leading civil service in India. And therefore, economics would be a good subject for it. So I was basically pushed into it. And then I stuck with it because 1990 and 91 was when India had the so-called external account crisis, a sort of balance of payments crisis. And that’s how I got into economics.

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