Sebastian Mallaby

Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has built a career decoding the hidden engines of economic change — hedge funds, central banks, venture capital, and now artificial intelligence.

Mallaby is the author of six major books, each capturing a defining force in modern capitalism. More Money Than God reframed hedge funds not as outliers, but as drivers of financial innovation. The Power Law revealed how venture capital quietly reshaped the modern economy, backing the companies that now dominate global markets.

His latest work, The Infinity Machine, marks a shift from capital to cognition. By tracing the rise of Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, Mallaby explores a deeper question: what happens when the most powerful force in the economy is no longer financial capital, but intelligence itself?

This is where his thinking sharpens. Sebastian Mallaby treats AI as a structural break.

Before his work in books and policy, Mallaby spent over twenty years reporting from the front lines of global change at The Economist and The Washington Post. He covered the collapse of apartheid, the evolution of Japan’s economy, and the inner workings of Washington power.

His biography of Alan Greenspan, The Man Who Knew, explored how technocratic power operates and where it fails. The book went on to win the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year.

As a speaker, Mallaby connects financial markets to political decisions. He links venture capital to geopolitical power. He shows how technological breakthroughs reshape not just industries, but the structure of economies themselves. Importantly, he focuses on second-order effects. The consequences most audiences haven’t yet considered, but will soon have to.

Sebastian Mallaby is the co-host of The Spillover, a podcast examining how global shocks ripple across systems. The premise mirrors his broader work. Nothing happens in isolation and the real story is always in the connections.