Blu Putnam is the Chief Economist and Managing Director at CME Group, the operator of futures and options exchanges around the world.  He is responsible for leading economic analysis on global financial, commodity, and agricultural markets.

Blu’s career has ranged from central banking to investment research to portfolio management.  When CME Group decided to create a focused Data Science team, Blu was tapped to create and lead the team over its formative years.  As the company’s chief economist, Blu regularly speaks at industry conferences, publishes research reports on the global economy and markets, as well as providing video content for CME’s web site. Blu earned his Ph.D. in economics from Tulane University in New Orleans.  He has six books on international finance and portfolio management to his credit as well as many academic articles, in such journals as The American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, American Statistical Association, and the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, among others. 

Blu’s newest book, Economics Gone Astray, published by the World Scientific Press, and authored with colleagues, Erik Norland and KT Arasu at CME Group, uses case studies to focus on common mistakes economists make, such as assuming behavior is linear (nothing happens in a straight line in economics as in life), forgetting about changes in the regulatory or demographics context, and generally over-simplifying theories in the desire to create more elegant mathematic models that may not, unfortunately, make for good economics.