Mario Draghi

Mario Draghi served as President of the European Central Bank from 2011 to 2019. He is most famous for his July 2012 speech in London where he declared the ECB would do "whatever it takes" to preserve the euro — a statement that almost single-handedly ended the European sovereign debt crisis by reassuring markets that the ECB would backstop eurozone sovereign debt. He subsequently launched the ECB's quantitative easing program. He served as Prime Minister of Italy from 2021 to 2022. In 2024, he authored the "Draghi Report" on European competitiveness for the European Commission, which became a landmark document on EU economic reform. Before the ECB, he served as Governor of the Banca d'Italia and as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs in the 1990s. He received his PhD in economics from MIT under Stanley Fischer. His report on European competitiveness diagnosed a structural gap between the EU and US in productivity, innovation investment, and capital market depth, calling for up to €800 billion in annual additional investment and the creation of common European debt instruments to finance it. This report became a central reference point in EU economic policy discussions.