Mario Draghi

Mario Draghi (born September 3, 1947, Rome, Italy) is an Italian economist who served from 2011 to 2019 as president of the European Central Bank (ECB), the financial institution responsible for making monetary decisions within the eurozone, that portion of the European Union whose members have adopted the European common currency. Draghi’s appointment came at a critical time, when stability within the eurozone was being challenged by the European sovereign debt crisis. In February 2021 he became prime minister of Italy at the head of a technocratic government; he held the post until October 2022.

Draghi was raised in Rome, where his father worked for the Bank of Italy (Italy’s central bank). After receiving a Jesuit secondary education and then graduating from the University of Rome, he studied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States under Franco Modigliani, who later won the Nobel Prize for Economics, and Stanley Fischer, future head of the central bank of Israel. He received a Ph.D. from MIT in 1976, the first Italian to earn a doctorate at that institution. During the 1980s he taught economics at the University of Florence and worked for the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

From 1991 to 2001 Draghi was director general of the Italian treasury. In that position, and as chairman of a national committee for privatization, he played a central role in reducing Italy’s public debt and annual budget deficits and in stabilizing interest rates and currency exchange rates. Those actions succeeded in allowing Italy to qualify for participation in the European monetary union of 1999.

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Draghi’s reform of Italy’s notoriously lax economic institutions earned him the nickname “Super Mario,” after the indomitable hero of the Nintendo video game. He also began to attract international notice. From 2002 to 2005 he was a vice-chairman and managing director at London-based Goldman Sachs International, a subsidiary of the American investment bank. In 2006 he took over the governorship of the Bank of Italy, and for the next five years he worked at introducing responsible management and strict monetary policy in that institution as well.

As governor of Italy’s central bank, Draghi was a member of the ECB’s governing council, which sets interest rates in the eurozone. He also became chairman of the Financial Stability Forum, an advisory body for the Group of 20 economically advanced countries. Following the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, that forum became the Financial Stability Board, and it acquired a mandate to devise regulatory standards that would prevent another near collapse of the banking system.

In June 2011 the European Council, made up of the heads of all the European Union countries, met to appoint a successor to the outgoing president of the ECB, Frenchman Jean-Claude Trichet. The leading contender was Draghi, but by that time the European debt crisis had resurrected old doubts about the wisdom and staying power of Italy’s economic managers—particularly in Germany, where the ECB was headquartered. In the end, Draghi’s long-standing reputation as a financial reformer and strict conservative on monetary policy reassured the Germans. After France received word that another Italian member of the ECB’s governing council would resign early to make way for a French member, the presidency of the world’s second most important central bank (after the U.S. Federal Reserve System) went to Draghi.

Draghi took office at a time when the very future of the euro seemed in doubt, but he moved quickly to reassure global markets about the stability of the EU’s shared currency. In July 2012 he stated that “the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” and this bold assertion came to be seen as the turning point of the crisis. Under Draghi the ECB adopted interventionist monetary policies that were aimed not just at calming the panic that had gripped the eurozone but at ensuring that Europe’s economies would be better positioned to weather future crises. Especially notable were Draghi’s introduction of negative interest rates—essentially, a penalty on banks that opted to hold large reserves of cash rather than lending it—and his use of quantitative easing to increase liquidity. Critics argued that the latter policy could trigger runaway inflation, but Draghi navigated the risks inherent in such a move and guided the eurozone toward economic recovery. His eight-year term at the ECB ended in 2019, and he was succeeded by Christine Lagarde.

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In January 2021 the government of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte collapsed when a key coalition partner withdrew during a dispute over the allocation of EU-provided COVID-19 relief funds. Conte was unsuccessful in his attempts to rebuild his coalition, and it seemed possible that Italy was headed toward a snap election in the middle of a pandemic. It was at this point that Italian Pres. Sergio Mattarella called upon Draghi to serve as prime minister at the head of a unity government. Over the following days Draghi assembled a cabinet that drew representation from a broad spectrum of Italy’s mainstream political parties, thus ensuring that he would have sufficient parliamentary support to advance his agenda. He was officially sworn in as prime minister of Italy on February 13, 2021.

Draghi led a technocratic administration that guided Italy out of the worst days of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. He secured more than €191 billion (nearly $230 billion) in pandemic recovery funding from the EU and oversaw the successful relaunch of Italy’s struggling vaccination campaign. By the end of 2021, more than four-fifths of Italians had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and Italy’s economy, which had been sent reeling by widespread shutdowns, was showing signs of a strong recovery. Draghi also was a prominent voice for European unity in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Italy dispatched military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and Draghi was the co-author (along with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen) of the sweeping sanctions package that targeted the Russian economy. Draghi worked to reduce Italy’s reliance on Russian natural gas by securing a new energy deal with Algeria. With parliamentary elections scheduled for spring 2023, however, Italy’s traditional political rivalries began to reassert themselves, and the strain proved too great for Draghi’s unity government. When the Five Star Movement—the party of Draghi’s predecessor—withdrew its support from a key spending package, Draghi treated the matter as a vote of confidence and submitted his resignation to Mattarella. Mattarella initially refused to accept the resignation, and Draghi spent the following week attempting to rebuild his coalition. On July 21, 2022, however, Draghi deemed that there was no path forward, and he dissolved parliament, triggering early elections.