Senior Industry Strategist

John can be contacted at
617-994-0505

Email: JBlank@DecisionEconomicsInc.com

Prior to assuming the position of Senior Industry Strategist at Decision Economics, John was CEO of Media Derivatives, a start-up financial exchange seeking to be the first regulated financial futures exchange for major motion pictures. This project emerged from work as an Associate Director in Corporate Development at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. At the CME, he was in charge of alternative product development and financial research. This portfolio included overseeing the development of commercial and residential real estate futures in the U.S. and the U.K., political risk futures, the aforementioned movie domestic box office futures, as well as a number of other product areas of interest to the Exchange. In addition, he regularly advised the CEO and management team on economic issues, acquisitions and minority investments, and regulatory affairs.

For two years, he also published a twice-a-month Fundamental Business Drivers in-depth economics piece written for the exchange community. Distributed to all CME employees, FBDs were short papers designed to help each department better understand the broad issues that impacted CMEs business. Drawing from this stock, he has published articles in Institutional Investors 2006 Guide to Algorithmic Trading: in the summer 2007 Journal of Trading: and an article on the role of strategic alliances in Chinese financial sector development in the winter 2007 Journal of Investing. He also published a book entitled Markets for Credit The State of Play in 2005, and presented it to the worlds central banks at the Chicago Feds Annual Capital Markets conference in January 2007.

Previous to CME, Dr. Blank served as the industry economist for J.P. Morgan Chase at its Bank One Capital Markets group in Chicago. He has also worked as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, and helped establish a twelve employee international economics practice for Ernst & Young LLP in Minneapolis-St. Paul. He earned his PhD. in economics from M.I.T. in 1995, studying under Olivier Blanchard, now the Chief Economist of the IMF: with the late Rudiger Dornbusch of M.I.T.: and with Jeffrey D. Sachs, while he taught at Harvard. He taught macroeconomics for two years at M.I.T. While serving on the faculty for one year at the University of California-Santa Cruz, he taught undergraduate courses, mathematics for economists and benefit-cost analysis: and a masters level course in international trade and development.