Sebastian Mallaby is director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and a Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Mallaby joined CFR from The Washington Post, where he served as a columnist and editorial board member. He is author of the bestselling The World’s Banker and most recently of More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite. Below, he tells us more about himself.
Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?
A. On my road bike zipping through the Northern Virginia countryside.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. If we interpret “today” with a little bit of poetic license to mean a typical day, Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?
A. Red wine.
Q. What surprises you most about your life right now?
A. That I enjoy lots of different things at once even though they apparently have no connection.
Q. Who was your childhood hero?
A. Martin Luther King.
Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?
A. Write a novel.
Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. Margarita.
Q. When do you feel most creative?
A. Around 5:22 p.m.
Q. Whose talent do you wish you had?
A. Jimi Hendrix’s.
Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan in India.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. A piece of Shona sculpture from Zimbabwe.
Q. What teacher or professor changed your life?
A. David Evans, who taught me high school history.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you would most like to meet for dinner?
A. Karl Marx, so I could ask him where he went wrong.
To read more about Mallaby’s talk on hedge funds at Zócalo, click here.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.