Dr. Donald H. Straszheim is Managing Principal of Straszheim Global Advisors, Inc., an economics, financial markets, business and policy consultancy. The firm was founded in 2001 with offices in Los Angeles and Beijing. For the last decade he has become one of America’s leading experts on China’s economy, business, finance markets and policy.

Straszheim is perhaps best known as former Global Chief Economist for Merrill Lynch and Co. (1985 to 1997), headquartered in New York and serving the firm’s investment banking, institutional sales and trading and private wealth management businesses worldwide. For 10 consecutive years he was voted to Institutional Investor’s All-Star team, Wall Street’s most prestigious award.

From 1997 to 2001, he was President of the Milken Institute in Los Angeles, a not-for-profit economic and financial markets think-tank, originating the highly successful Milken Institute Global Conference. From 2006 to 2008, he served as Vice Chairman of Roth Capital Partners, a boutique broker-dealer, spearheading the firm’s highly successful China initiative. Earlier in his career he was Chief Economist at Wharton Econometrics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Chief Economist at the global forest products firm Weyerhaeuser Company, and Chief U.S. Economist at money management firm Investors’ Diversified Services.

Straszheim is a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, serves on various private and public sector boards, is past president of the Chartered Financial Analysts of Los Angeles and a member of the Advisory Board of the Asia Society of Southern California. He earned a BS, MS and Ph.D. from Purdue University and is a regular TV and radio guest, and frequent speaker and writer on Chinese, global and U.S. economic and financial topics.