Professor, writer, Honorary Member of the Council of State, Special Adviser to the President of the Republic from 1981 to 1991, founder and first President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London from 1991 to 1993, Jacques Attali (www.attali.com) is currently CEO of A&A, an international consulting firm in strategy, based in Paris, and President of Positive Planet, an international non-profit organisation assisting microfinance institutions all over the world. PlaNet Finance is the most important world institution of support to the microfinance. Positive Planet advises and finances the development of the microfinance in 80 countries, and launched the LH Forum, movement for positive economy.

He founded Action Contre la Faim in 1980 and the European programme Eurêka (a major European programme on new technologies that invented, among other things, the MP3). In, 1989, he also launched an international programme of action against the disastrous floods in Bangladesh. Jacques Attali then advised the Secretary General of the United Nations on the risks of nuclear proliferation. He is at the origin of the higher education reform, known as LMD, to bring all European degrees into line.

Jacques Attali has a doctorate in Economics and is a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique (first in the class of 1963), the Ecole des Mines, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and the Ecole Nationale de l’Administration. He taught Economic Theory at the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and the University of Paris-Dauphine. He has received honorary doctorates from several foreign universities and is a member of the Universal Academy of Cultures.

Jacques Attali is an editorialist for the magazine L’Express. He has written fifty books, translated into more than twenty languages, with over six million copies sold all over the world, including essays (dealing with a wide variety of subjects ranging from mathematical economics, to music), biographies, novels, children’s tales and plays.

Jacques Attali was nominated President of the Commission for the liberation for French economic growth by the President of the French Republic in August 2007. He belongs to the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, according to the Foreign Policy Magazine (May/June 2008 and 2010).