Paul Blustein is a nonresident fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution. His primary field of expertise is international economics, including trade and financial crises.

Prior to joining Brookings as a journalist in residence in 2006, Blustein was a staff writer at the Washington Post, where he mostly covered economic policy and related issues. He started at the Post in 1987 and served in its Tokyo bureau as Asian economics correspondent from 1990 to 1995. As the paper's international economics correspondent, a position he assumed in September 1995, he reported stories from countries all over the world including Pakistan, Egypt, Argentina, Honduras, Indonesia, China, Qatar, Greece, Mali and Ethiopia.

He took two book leaves from the Post, during which he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for International Economics (in 1999 and 2000) and a guest scholar at Brookings (in 2003 and 2004). Before working at the Post he was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal from 1979 to 1987, the last four years of which he was the paper’s chief economics correspondent, covering the Federal Reserve, budget and tax policy; he came to the Journal after working at Forbes Magazine as a writer from 1976 to 1979.

Among the prizes he has received for his reporting is the Gerald Loeb Award, generally regarded as the most prestigious prize in the field of business and economic journalism.

In his books, Blustein specializes in writing about complex economic issues and institutions using dramatic narratives and behind-the-scenes reporting, with the aim of making the subjects appealing for expert and non-expert readers alike. He is the author of The Chastening: Inside the Crisis That Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF (PublicAffairs, 2001), And the Money Kept Rolling In (And Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina (PublicAffairs, 2005), and Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations: Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System (PublicAffairs, 2009).

His current focus is a book and research papers about the role played by international institutions in the global financial crisis that began in 2007. From April to July 2010, he was working on that project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, as a Public Policy Scholar, and in August 2010 he was appointed senior visiting fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo, Canada. Starting in April 2011, he continued work on this project on an Abe Fellowship, which is administered by the Social Science Research Council in partnership with the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

His work has received support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Pew Fellowships in International Journalism, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the United States-Japan Foundation.

Born in 1951 in Washington, D.C., Blustein received his B.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1973. As a Rhodes Scholar, he received an M.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University in 1975. A resident of Kamakura, Japan, he is married to Yoshie Sakai and is the father of four children.

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