Paul Blustein is an award-winning economic journalist and acclaimed author who has spent more than four decades covering the high drama of global finance, crisis politics, and international trade.
He began his career at The Wall Street Journal (1979-1987) and later joined The Washington Post (1987-2006), serving in the Post’s Tokyo bureau (1990-1995) before becoming its international economics correspondent. His reporting-spanning over 50 countries across six continents-earned him the Gerald Loeb Award, business journalism’s most prestigious prize, for his incisive coverage of the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation. Following his journalism career, Blustein served as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). He now serves as Senior Associate (Non-Resident) in the Economics Program and Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he focuses on global economic governance, financial stability, and technology-driven power shifts. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Blustein is the author of seven major works of narrative nonfiction that map the fault lines of the global economy: The Chastening (2001), And the Money Kept Rolling In (And Out) (2005), Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations (2009), Off Balance (2013), Laid Low (2016), Schism: China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System (2019), and King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency (Yale University Press, 2025). Reviewers from The Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Review of Books have described his works as “gripping,” “richly nuanced,” and “superbly reported.”
Based in Kamakura, Japan, Blustein continues to illuminate how global institutions function-and sometimes fail-through meticulously researched, human-centered storytelling that bridges journalism, economics, and history.
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