Diana Farrell

Diana Farrell was a member and one of two Deputy Directors of the United States National Economic Council (NEC) in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was also a member of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry. On November 22, 2010, Farrell announced that she would be leaving the administration by the end of the year. Lawrence Summers, then the Director of the NEC, who had previously announced that he would return at the end of the year to Harvard University, noted that Farrell had "played a central role" in the efforts of the administration to encourage economic growth, restructure the auto industry, and respond to the housing crisis. Summers further stated: "Her natural talent as a policy maker and her good judgment made her invaluable in setting a course for economic recovery." Farrell most recently served as the Director of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), McKinsey & Company's economics research arm. Farrell's work has appeared in academic journals, books, and on the op–ed pages of leading international publications, and she is a frequent speaker at major U.S. and global conferences. She is the editor of an anthology series based on MGI research, published by Harvard Business Press, 2007. Together with Lowell Bryan, she is the co-author of Market Unbound, published by John Wiley & Sons, 1996. Farrell was previously a leader of McKinsey's Global Financial Institutions and Global Strategy practices. Prior to joining McKinsey, she worked for Goldman Sachs in New York. Farrell has a B.A. from Wesleyan University in Economics (College of Social Studies) and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Farrell is a member of Council on Foreign Relations, the Bretton Woods Committee, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is married with two children. In 2003, Farrell was the author of a paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be "as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so." In a video for the McKinsey Global Institute, where she formerly served as a director, Farrell describes four "newly powerful" brokers. One of these is "Asian economies which are...generating significant surpluses." Farrell is a supporter of regulation of large banks. In an interview with National Public Radio, she stated: "We have created them, and we're sort of past that point, and I think that in some sense, the genie's out of the bottle and what we need to do is to manage them and to oversee them, as opposed to hark back to a time that we're unlikely to ever come back to or want to come back to."