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On 1 July 2026 Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas cleared his desk at the IMF and went back to Berkeley. Six days later Kristalina Georgieva named a Tucumán-born professor from the London School of Economics to replace him, and on 10 August Silvana Tenreyro walked into the Research Department with a war, a tariff regime and an AI boom waiting on the desk. This is who she is, why the Fund chose her, and what it means if you want to be one of the economists who works for her.
On Friday 26 June 2026 Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas gave Reuters an exit interview. He had four days left as the IMF’s chief economist and he used them to say something economists in his position usually avoid. Twice during his tenure, he said, the Fund had declined to publish a baseline forecast for the world economy, in April 2025 after the United States upended global trade with tariffs and again in April 2026 with the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil above $100. Both times the Fund had published scenarios instead. There was, he told Andrea Shalal, “little historical precedent on which to base a credible baseline forecast”, which meant economists had to “be humble” and map out a range of outcomes. “We don’t want to do it too often.” He also said what he thought about the tools the Americans had been using. Tariffs and sanctions, he said, give you “leverage in the short term, and then actors on the other side respond. They are not passive.” In the medium to long term, “they almost never work.”
Then he left. Georgieva’s farewell statement, issued when his departure was announced on 1 May, credited him with “exceptional intellectual leadership at a time of extraordinary global uncertainty”, listed the things built on his watch, the AI Preparedness Index, the Structural Reforms Impact Tool, a data hub and a new generation of macroeconomic models, and singled out the alternative scenarios on the Middle East war that “informed policy discussions during the recent Spring Meetings”. Four years is normal for the job. Gita Gopinath did three. Olivier Blanchard did seven.
What was not normal was the context. Gopinath, the first woman to hold the chief economist post and later the Fund’s first deputy managing director, had herself left on 22 August 2025 to return to Harvard. She was replaced in October by Dan Katz, who had been chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the same Bessent who in April 2025 had told the Institute of International Finance that “mission creep has knocked these institutions off course”. So when Gourinchas went, the Fund had turned over both of its senior economic posts inside a year, one of them to the US Treasury’s nominee, and the research job was the one left to fill on Georgieva’s own terms.
She took six days. On 7 July the Fund announced that Silvana Tenreyro, the James E. Meade Professor of Economics at the LSE, would become Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department from 10 August. “Silvana is a globally respected economist who combines outstanding academic achievements with extensive policy making experience and a close engagement with leading international institutions,” Georgieva said. “At a time of profound transformation and heightened uncertainty in the global economy, Silvana’s mix of intellectual leadership and policy experience will help ensure that the Fund’s analytical work and multilateral surveillance and policy advice will remain at the cutting edge in support of our membership.”
Tenreyro’s own statement, released through the LSE two days later, was shorter and had a personal edge. “I am delighted to join the IMF, and I will do my best to help advance the Fund’s mission of stability, economic growth and shared prosperity. This wouldn’t have happened without LSE, where like nowhere else, it is possible to combine rigorous academic work while being engaged in policy.”
The biography explains the choice. Tenreyro was born in San Miguel de Tucumán in the north of Argentina, took her first degree summa cum laude at the National University of Tucumán in 1997, and went to Harvard for a master’s and a doctorate supervised by Robert Barro, Alberto Alesina and Kenneth Rogoff. She worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 2002 to 2004, then moved to the LSE, where she has been on the faculty since. She sat on the monetary policy committee of the Bank of Mauritius from 2012 to 2014, which is the kind of line that only appears on the CV of someone who says yes to small central banks because they are interesting. She was president of the European Economic Association in 2021 and a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society and the Royal Economic Society. The prizes include the Yrjö Jahnsson Award, the Birgit Grodal Award and, from the Kiel Institute, the Bernhard Harms Prize, whose president Moritz Schularick praised her research for deepening “our understanding of how diversification and the nature of shocks shape economic growth and welfare in both emerging and advanced economies”. She holds Argentine, Italian and British passports.
The part of the CV the markets remember is the Bank of England. From July 2017 to July 2023 Tenreyro was an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee, two full terms, and she spent the last eighteen months of them as the nine-member panel’s most consistent voice against raising rates. Bloomberg called her the Bank’s “arch dove”. In February 2023 she voted to hold at 3.5 percent while her colleagues went to 4. In May 2023 she voted to hold at 4.25 while they went to 4.5. She said in public that rates at 4 percent were “too high” and that the risk was the Bank had overtightened and would push inflation below its 2 percent target in the medium term. She was outvoted every time, and then the Bank cut, and then the argument got more interesting than it had seemed at the time.
Since leaving Threadneedle Street she has added one more line that nobody at the Fund has missed. In 2025 she joined the Economic Advisory Council of Anthropic, the AI company, advising on what the technology does to labour markets and growth. The Fund’s own July outlook, published on 8 July by Petya Koeva Brooks, the Research Department’s deputy director, and Deniz Igan, a division chief, in the gap between chief economists, was titled “Global Economy in Crosscurrents of War and Technology”. Global growth of 3.0 percent this year and 3.4 next, against 3.5 on average in 2024 and 2025, with the energy shock from the Middle East war on one side and an AI-driven investment boom on the other, and emerging economies slowing to 3.8 percent before recovering to 4.5 in 2027. Georgieva has hired a chief economist whose last two jobs were the two forces in that title.
Now the part that matters if you’re not a professor.
The Research Department is the most academic corner of an institution that employs around 3,100 people from over 162 countries, and its director sets the tone for the kind of economist the Fund values. Tenreyro’s appointment is a statement that the Fund still wants the monetary transmission and trade theorists, but it also tells you what else is being asked for. Her published work is on volatility, diversification and how shocks propagate through emerging economies, which is close to the questions the Fund’s country teams are being asked every week about energy importers in South Asia and the Gulf. Her AI work matches a department that built an AI Preparedness Index under Gourinchas and will now be run by someone who has been in the room with the companies building the models. And her communication record, the thing Georgieva praised twice in one press release, calling her “an exceptional leader and communicator” admired for “openness to diverse perspectives”, is a hint about the Fund’s own nervousness after two years of publishing scenarios instead of forecasts. The next chief economist’s job is to get the Fund back to saying what it thinks, clearly, and to have the standing to defend it.
The door into that department, and into the Fund more generally, is the Economist Program. It is a three-year appointment made up of two 18-month assignments in different departments, designed, in the Fund’s words, to build its future leaders. The 2026 intake starts on 8 September, and the bar is precise: a PhD completed within a year of joining, in macroeconomics, finance, public finance, monetary or international economics, trade, political economy, econometrics or the Fund’s newer areas of poverty and macro-climate; an excellent academic record; strong English; nationality of a member country; and an age below 34 at entry. The Fund Internship Program takes doctoral students for the summer and feeds the same pipeline. There is nothing like the World Bank’s old side door through short-term consulting. You come in through the EP, through a mid-career economist posting, or not at all.
There is a sharper implication in Tenreyro’s arrival for anyone in the middle of a PhD. The Fund has chosen a chief economist who arrives with a formal AI advisory role on her CV. The research questions that will get attention and budget under her are the ones about what technology investment does to productivity, wages and the current account in countries at very different stages of development, and the ones about how a small open economy survives a shock it did not cause. If your dissertation is on the macroeconomics of AI adoption in emerging markets, or on commodity shocks and diversification, you are writing for the department’s new director whether you know it or not.
Tenreyro inherits a department that spent April drawing three versions of the future because it could not bring itself to pick one. Gourinchas said the Fund should do that rarely. Her first World Economic Outlook is due at the Annual Meetings in Bangkok next week. That is where we find out whether the arch dove is also willing to be the one who commits.
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