She distinguished herself in the shadows in the negotiations of the Paris agreement or in banking and insurance: Laurence Boone is now preparing to step into the spotlight after her appointment as Secretary of State for European Affairs this Monday, July 4 in the new government of Elisabeth Borne. She succeeds in this position to Clément Beaune, appointed Minister in charge of Transport.
A leading figure among French economists, Laurence Boone, chief economist of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since 2018, had been promoted to deputy secretary general of the organization in January 2022. Until October 2016, she had played the role of Sherpa to President François Hollande on European issues, assuming the role of a woman in the shadows who negotiates agreements with her European counterparts.
She had distinguished herself for her support for keeping Greece in the euro zone, her participation in the 2015 G20 or her work on the financing of COP21. In April 2016, after leaving the Elysée, she returned to her position on the board of directors of the luxury group Kering, until her appointment to the OECD.
In 2020 in the midst of a health crisis, she was noticed by Emmanuel Macron during a meeting with several economists for having made “a very structured presentation, respecting the time allotted to her”, unlike others who told her succeeded thereafter, according to a source at the Élysée interviewed by AFP who underlined this quality at home “of never getting out of the nails”. 53-year-old Laurence Boone, who published a thesis in econometrics devoted to the “Kalman filter applied to structural rates of growth and unemployment”, has forged the reputation of “going straight to the point”, underlines Bercy . According to Le Figaro, those who knew her describe Laurence Boone as a tireless worker, an outstanding teacher and an affable person.
Laurence Boone and Emmanuel Macron have known each other for a long time. She had succeeded him at the Elysée Palace in the summer of 2014 as economic adviser when he left office before being appointed Minister of the Economy. Both went through an investment bank: Emmanuel Macron at Rothschild and Laurence Boone at the American Bank of America-Merryll Lynch, where she led economic research on Europe, after having held a similar position within Barclays bank.
In June 2014, her appointment as adviser for macroeconomic affairs to François Hollande at the Elysee Palace irritated the left wing of the socialist majority. “I have left-wing inclinations”, then assured Laurence Boone to the World. “I am not at all ashamed of my career, I have proven myself in this environment. It is precisely because I have a lot of international experience that I do not come from a totally Franco-French universe. French and that I have a different look that the president recruits me”, she explained at the time.
With her international experience and her perfect command of English, acquired in London during her doctorate at the London Business School, this familiar with circles of power is reminiscent of Christine Lagarde, the current President of the ECB, “but in a less bourgeois style,” a source told AFP.
The 50-year-old frequents the “big guys” of the planet, at international summits such as the Davos Forum. His invitation in 2015 to the very select and secret Bilderberg group, a meeting of leaders and big bosses in the Austrian Tyrol, had also made people talk.
During confinement, she made her first appearances in the spotlight to talk about the crisis. She was the guest of Yann Barthes’ Quotidien primetime program on TMC, like another chief economist, that of the IMF Gita Gopinath, who offered herself Jimmy Fallon’s set in the United States. . Previously, in 2013 and 2014, Laurence Boone had signed columns with Opinion.
Cited in 2019 among the “50 most influential French people in the world” in Vanity Fair, Laurence Boone is part of the feminine wave that has swept over economic institutions in recent years, with in particular the appointment of Christine Lagarde as head of the ECB. , after that of the IMF. “It is progress that women are appointed to the positions of chief economists of major international or national organisations,” she said when she was appointed to the OECD. But last year, she told AFP that male economists have published “two to three times as many” scientific papers during the pandemic, showing that there is “still a lot of work to be done to promote equality between men and women.
As soon as she took office at the OECD, she repeatedly called on governments to avoid an escalation in the trade war in the face of the risks of penalizing growth which threatened to slow down if the United States, China or the EU imposed high customs duties on imports. It has also repeatedly encouraged European countries with fiscal space to invest more in infrastructure. Last month, she warned in the introduction to the latest OECD economic forecasts that “the world will pay a heavy price for Russia’s war against Ukraine”.
