Paul McCulley

Paul McCulley spent many years as a Managing Director at PIMCO, working alongside Bill Gross and generating influential macro economic commentary through PIMCO's research publications. He is credited with coining the term "shadow banking system" in 2007 to describe the network of non-bank financial intermediaries that had grown to rival traditional banks in credit provision — a term that proved prophetic when this shadow system collapsed in 2008. He also popularized the concept of "Minsky moments" — referring to economist Hyman Minsky's theory of financial instability. After PIMCO, he has been an advocate for Modern Monetary Theory and post-Keynesian economics as frameworks for understanding monetary policy. His writings on the interaction between fiscal policy, monetary policy, and private credit creation have provided investors with a heterodox but empirically grounded framework for understanding how government deficits, central bank operations, and bank lending interact to determine aggregate demand and inflation.