The International Monetary Fund just handed the keys to its research department to Silvana Tenreyro, a British-Argentine economist whose resume reads like someone speedrunning the economics profession. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva announced the appointment on July 7, making Tenreyro the organization’s new Economic Counsellor and Head of the Research Department.

Who is Silvana Tenreyro

Tenreyro is a professor at the London School of Economics with a PhD and MA from Harvard, where she studied under Robert Barro and Kenneth Rogoff. She also holds an undergraduate degree from Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in Argentina.

She served as an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee from July 2017 to July 2023, getting reappointed for a second term in 2020. She also served as President of the European Economic Association in 2021 and held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and as Director of the CEPR International Finance and Macroeconomics Programme. Georgieva specifically noted Tenreyro’s previous role on the IMF’s External Advisory Group as further evidence she already understood the institution’s inner workings.

She received the Kiel Institute’s 2025 Bernhard Harms Prize and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2023.

Why the IMF’s chief economist matters for crypto

The IMF has been one of the more vocal international institutions when it comes to crypto regulation. It has repeatedly urged countries to avoid granting Bitcoin legal tender status, most notably clashing with El Salvador over its 2021 Bitcoin adoption. The fund’s research arm has published extensive analysis on the risks of crypto adoption in developing economies, the potential for stablecoins to undermine monetary sovereignty, and frameworks for regulating digital assets.