Mark Zandi
Mark Zandi is an American economist and co-founder of Moody's Economy.com, a widely cited source of economic analysis. Moody's Economy.com is part of Moody's Analytics. Prior to founding Economy.com, Zandi was a regional economist at Chase Econometrics. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia of Iranian descent and grew up in Radnor, Pennsylvania. Zandi received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His surname of "Zandi" comes from the Zand dynasty (formally known as the Zandieh dynasty), which ruled southern and south-central Iran (1750–1794) in the eighteenth century. Zandi's analysis of the impact of an economic stimulus package on the United States economy was cited by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein in their report on President Barack Obama's proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, which became the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Zandi has been criticized for assuming government spending multipliers that are too large.