Jacques Attali was born on 1 November 1943 in Algiers (Algeria), into a Jewish family.

Polytechnician, enarch, economist and political advisor to the President of the Republic François Mitterrand for ten years, Attali is the founder of 4 international institutions: Action Against Hunger, EUREKA, EBRD and Positive Planet. The Positive Planet Foundation have been promoting the positive economy and supporting the creation of positive businesses in neighbourhoods in France, Africa and the Middle East for 22 years. It has supported more than 11 million micro-entrepreneurs.

Jacques Attali has written more than 1000 editorials in the magazine L’Express and is the author of more than 80 books sold 9 million copies and translated into 22 languages.

Interested in arts, he has been nominated to serve on the board of the Musée d’Orsay. He has also conducted several orchestras around the world (Paris, Grenoble, London, Jerusalem, Shanghai, Astana, Montreal, Lausanne, Brussels, Helsinki, etc.).

In 2009, Foreign Policy called him as one of the top 100 “global thinkers” in the world.

From 2008 to 2010, he led the government committee on how to ignite the growth of the French economy, under President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Jacques Attali is now President of A&A, an international strategy consulting firm, based in Paris, and President of the Positive Planet Foundation, which aims to support the most vulnerable by promoting the positive economy. He is also a columnist for the newspaper Les Echos.