30 Amazing Facts You Probably Didn't Know About Mario Draghi

19 January 2019, 5:24 pm EST By Ruby Karnick

Mario Draghi, the President of the European Central Bank, is an Italian economist. Here are some interesting facts about the banker:

He has been serving as the President of the European Central Bank since 2011, succeeding Jean-Claude Trichet.
In the year 2015, he was ranked as the second greatest leader in the world by the Fortune magazine.
Before becoming the President, he served as the Chairman of the Financial Stability Board from 2009 to 2011 as well as the Governor of the Bank of Italy from 2005 to 2011.
Mario Roberto Draghi was born on September 3, 1947 in Rome to Calo Draghi and Glida Mancini, who was a pharmacist.
His father Carlo Draghi first joined Banca d'Italia in the year 1922, then served the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), and in the end Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.
Maria has a younger sister named Andreina, an art historian and a younger brother named Marcello, who is an entrepreneur.
He went to Massimiliano Massimo Institute, a Jesuit School in Rome, and then graduated from the La Sapienza University, also known as the University of Rome.
For his graduation in the University of Rome, he did a thesis titled "Economic Integration and Exchange Rates Changes" under the guidance of Federico Caffe.
He earned his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the year 1976.
For his PhD thesis, he chose to study the matter of "Essays on economic theory and applications" under the guidance of Franco Modigliani and Robert Solow.

He started his career in the year 1981 as a full professor at the Cesare Alfieri Faculty of Political Science of the University of Florence, where he served till 1994.
During his tenure at the Treasury, Draghi chaired the committee that revised Italian corporate and financial legislation and drafted the law that governs Italian financial markets.
In the 1991, he became the general director of the Italian Treasury at the initiative of the then Minister Guido Carli, and held this office until 2001.
He is also a former board member of several banks like Eni, Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro and IMI.
He joined the World Bank as an Italian Executive Director in the year 1984, a position he served till 1990.
Draghi is a trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey as well as the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C.
For the period 2002 to 2005, he served as the vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International. He was also a member of the firm-wide management committee.
During his time at Goldman Sachs, he worked on the company's European strategy and development with major European corporations and governments.
He was appointed as the Governor of Bank of Italy in December 2005. As the Governor of Bank of Italy, Draghi was a member of the Governing and General Councils of the European Central Bank.
He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements and was also the governor for Italy on the Boards of Governors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Development Bank.

In April 2006, Draghi was elected as the Chairman of the Financial Stability Forum, which three years later became the Financial Stability Board on behalf of the G20.
He wrote a letter along with the immediate past governor of the ECB, Jean Claude Trichet on August 5, 2011, to the Italian government to push for a series of economic measures.
On June 2, 2011, his appointment as the President of ECB was confirmed by the European leaders and his tenure will run from November 1, 2011 to October 31, 2019.
During his candidacy, concerns related to his past employment at Goldman Sachs were expressed and even Pascal Canfin (MEP) asserted Draghi was involved in swaps for European governments, for which Draghi has responded that he had nothing to do with.
In December 2011, he, as the President of ECB, oversaw a $640 billion three-year loan program from ECB to European banks.
He provoked a wave of talks on the concept of "helicopter money," a proposed unconventional monetary policy, after declaring at a press conference on March 10, 2016, that he thinks the concept is 'very interesting.'
He is a member of the Group of Thirty, a private group of lobbyists in the finance sector, founded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
He has been criticized in the context of the scandals rising around the bank Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), since 2013, as the bank was making very risky deals.
He has been awarded a honorary distinction in Statistics in 2009 by the University of Padua, and a honorary Master in Business administration in 2010, by the Vicenza, CUOA Foundation.
He was honored with a doctorate by the Tel Aviv University in 2017 and a PhD in Economics by the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa the very next year.