Ms. Shari Spiegel is the Director of the Financing for Sustainable Development Office (FSDO) within the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations (UN DESA). In this capacity, she oversees support for intergovernmental negotiations on financing issues, analytical work on financing for sustainable development, and the UN work on tax issues. She was previously Chief of the Policy Analysis and Development Branch of FSDO (UN DESA), where she was integral to the negotiations on the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, launched the 60-agency Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development, and oversaw publication of the task force’s annual Financing for Sustainable Development Report.
Ms. Spiegel has nearly 20 years of private sector experience, including as a Principal at New Holland Capital (an advisor on alternative investments to APG, the Dutch Civil Servants Pension Fund), Director at Lazard LLC and Senior Portfolio Manager in charge of fixed income emerging markets at Lazard Asset Management, and posts at Citibank and Drexel Burnham Lambert in fixed income research, cross-currency interest-rate-swap trading, and credit research. In the early 1990s, she co-founded and was Chief Executive Officer of Budapest Alapkezelő, which launched the first domestic investment funds in Hungary.
From 2002 to 2007, Ms. Spiegel served as the Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think-tank at Columbia University founded by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, which focuses on macroeconomics and economic development in developing countries. She has worked as a foreign adviser to the Hungarian Central Bank and as a consultant to the World Bank/International Finance Corporation. She is author and co-author of several books and articles on financial and capital markets, debt issues, macroeconomics, and development. She has an MA in economics from Princeton University and a BA in economics and applied mathematics from Northwestern University.