Martin Mühleisen is a former International Monetary Fund (IMF) official with decades-long experience in economic crisis management and financial diplomacy. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, focusing on questions of global economics and multilateral institutions.

At the IMF, Mühleisen served as Chief of Staff and principal advisor to Managing Director Christine Lagarde, and subsequently as director of the Strategy, Policy, and Review Department. He represented the IMF in Group of Seven (G7) and Group of Twenty (G20) meetings, participating in numerous deputy meetings and six leader summits.

As head of strategy, he led the IMF’s unprecedented response to the COVID-19 crisis, as well as the work toward issuing new Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and implementing the G20 Common Framework for Debt Relief. Earlier in his career, Mühleisen was deeply involved in the IMF’s response to the global financial crisis, with personal sign-off responsibility for the Euro area programs with Greece, Ireland, and Portugal.

A German national and Konrad Adenauer scholar, Mühleisen holds a master’s degree in economics from Cambridge University and a PhD summa cum laude in economics from the University of Munich. He has published and overseen work on macro-financial analysis, the international monetary system and digital currencies, economic linkages, fiscal policy, aging, saving, and inequality.