Piecing Together Global Economic Puzzles
Dr. Nomi Prins is a former Wall Street Executive, Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker, Author, Geo-Political Economist, Financial Expert, Founder of Prinsights Global and PhD.
"I confess, I've never really thought about my purpose. I've been more of a get-on-with-life person, so I welcomed this opportunity and challenge to consider my purpose.
I aspire to be a global puzzle solver, a term I use to describe my commitment to understanding and unraveling the complexities of the world's economic systems. This involves a continuous process of learning and sharing knowledge about the intricate interplay of factors that shape our global economy.
My purpose is to connect the dots, to draw lines between seemingly disparate elements of the economic, financial and geopolitical landscape. It is to delve into these connections through boots-on-the-ground research and experiences and to educate others on the patterns and trends that shape our world.
My goal is to provide people with insights they can use to better understand the world of money and power, and to bring clarity to what can often seem complex and opaque.
It is to simplify and demystify economics, geopolitics, and finance.
When I consider my purpose more deeply, I think about solving puzzles. My passion for puzzles might have started when I was a little girl. First with my father’s guidance and then on my own, I used to decipher 1000-piece puzzles on the dining room table for hours.
Somewhere along the way, I learned that the way to understand things is to look at how they interact on a small details level. The purpose of my life took me from those childhood lessons to a world demanding to be uncovered.
The Geography of Failure and Purpose
There are a few key moments in my life where these inner driving forces, as they do in life, came together for me. These spanned the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. They spanned my early career and education.
One pivotal set of moments, delineated by geography, were borne from failure – or what appeared to be a failure at the time, but in hindsight was a path to a broader array of discoveries.
When I was 22, I worked full-time on Wall Street and juggled a full-time master's program at New York University. My social life was nonexistent.
Having completed my MS, I began my PhD – while working full-time at Lehman Brothers. By 24, I completed my coursework for a PhD in statistics at New York University. Somehow, I squeezed coursework hours into Wall Street demands.
When I sat down before my panel of three professors to take my comprehensive exams, it was after five weeks of intense studying for them. We were allowed one index card of notes – and that meant tiny writing of many formulas.
I failed my comprehensive exam.
As I struggled to hold back tears upon the news, one of my professors, Dr. Howard Shapiro told me – if you need an index card, you haven’t learned the material. He was right and to this day, whatever information I do share, I make sure I study and learn it deeply, first.
I don’t use notes in any of my public speeches.
Despite that setback, I had a choice. I could go back and restudy and retake my comps within the year, or I could move to London, which was the other option presented to me at the same time by Bear Stearns.
Gathering Intel on The World of Money
My deep love of travel beckoned. I chose London. I created an international analytics department for Bear Stearns from scratch and rose to become a senior managing director there at a time when such roles for women were few and far between.
Analytics, digging into numbers, digging into programs, digging into trends, digging into patterns was always a natural and motivating current within my brain. This passion for understanding and uncovering the truth has been a driving force in my career.
That stint in London lasted 7 years. I returned to New York in early 2000 as a managing director at Goldman Sachs. After two years, I quit Wall Street during corporate scandals, including Enron and WorldCom.
I became a journalist. I went from a corner office on the 29th floor as a managing director at Goldman to bringing coffee to the senior writer at Fortune Magazine, where I got my first opportunity to write articles. It was an incredibly humbling and liberating experience.
I pursued journalism to uncover and explain everything I had learned throughout my decade and a half in finance and how it impacts everyone else on Main Street or real people in the real world.
My first book, Other People's Money, delved into that subject. At the time, I was considered a Wall Street whistleblower for exposing the inner workings of Goldman Sachs and the intersection of investment banks and the energy and telecommunication sectors.
The Economist called it, "The most revealing description yet of what it is like to work for the mighty Goldman Sachs."
My subsequent books whether focused on the United States or global policies, on history, or on present times, held one thing in common. That was to expose how those in power utilize money to accumulate power for themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.
Much of that imbalance is due to the fact that the rest of the world doesn't understand what's happening or how it's happening.
My goal is to shine a light on it.
New Direction in Purpose
In 2016, I gave a talk in Brazil to PhD students while on a research trip for my sixth book, Collusion, an exploration of how central banks rigged the world of finance after the 2008 financial crisis.
I explained to them how the dots or circles of life brought me in front of them. I shared my choice after failing my comps to do something else away from my PhD.
Afterward, the head of the department said to me - well, why don't you finish your PhD?
The convenient answer was that I had a lot of other things going on in my life.
I spoke before press conferences and stock exchanges in Tokyo, industrial manufacturers in Mexico, central bankers in Brazil, parliament members in the United Kingdom, miners in Canada, and hundreds of members of the United States government on matters of financial fairness and transparency and the basic economic needs of people everywhere.
I didn't have time to do a PhD. Plus, by that time, I had written six books since I left Wall Street, and written hundreds of articles and appeared on hundreds of TV and radio interviews around the world. That seemed enough.
And yet, I still felt that internal gnawing that you do with unfinished "business."
Fast-forward eight years and many conversations on the topic. My father, who taught me the lessons of solving puzzles and sharing the results, was dying.
Two days before my dad passed away, he said, "You need to finish your PhD."
That same night, that professor reached out to me. He asked me if I had any other thoughts about the economics program at UFGRS in Porto Alegre, where I had given that talk and where many esteemed leaders in Brazil had received their doctorates.
But I was still too busy.
Six months later, COVID-19 happened. During the pandemic, I finally finished my PhD, mostly remotely. It wasn't a continuation of my initial foray into statistics nearly three decades earlier. The world had become more complex than statistical formulas, numbers, or financial equations could explain.
I wrote my PhD dissertation on the economic triangle of China, Brazil, and the United States .Those dots formed a binding set of new connections and directions for me.
My Ph.D. was an educational milestone that enabled me to consider more deeply another piece of the global economic puzzle. And it was about honoring my father's wishes and life-long intellectual curiosities that had become my own.
The world revolves around money, power, and geopolitics. It also contains real assets mined from beneath its surface and real people who manage their own personal households and finances through good times and bad.
That entails making sense of events, markets, relationships, power and struggle.
I strive to continue to connect those global dots for people everywhere through my books, articles, and now, on my Substack, where I publish ongoing research under the umbrella of the company I founded, Prinsights Global.
I can't and won't stop deciphering, decoding, and sharing my insights.
That is my purpose."
