Daleep Singh set to return to White House: report

Indian American Economist Daleep Singh, a key architect of the Biden administration’s economic sanctions on Russia, is coming back to the White House, according to a media report.

Singh, who served in the Treasury Department in the Obama administration, will return to his previous role as deputy national security adviser for international economics taking over for Mike Pyle who leaves at the end of the month, Axios reported.

Daleep Singh’s return as the deputy national security adviser for international economics “will allow him to pick up where he left off in April of 2022 — looking for innovative ways to punish Russia and help support Ukraine,” the news website suggested.

READ: Daleep Singh joins PGIM Fixed Income as chief global economist (June 22, 2022)

The position, which reports to both the NSC and the National Economic Council, is one of the most important in the White House.

As part of the portfolio, Singh will help coordinate the US position at both the G7 and G20 summits.

This year the G7 leaders will meet in June in Italy. The G20 summit is scheduled to occur in Brazil in November after the presidential election.

With a $95 billion foreign aid package stuck in Congress, Biden officials are exploring how they can help Ukraine without Congressional authorization, Axios said.

One idea that is gaining currency is to use Russia’s frozen sovereign assets, which are mostly held in Europe, as collateral for loans to Ukraine, it said.

Read: Indian American Daleep Singh leads US sanctions against Russia (February 23, 2022)

Belgium has recently floated this idea to G7 countries, but Singh wrote about it back in December of 2022 in Barron’s.

The great grand-nephew of Daleep Singh Saund, the first Asian-American elected to the US Congress, has been working as the chief economist for PGIM Fixed Income.

Singh was appointed as Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor in February 2021. He previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for international affairs and acting Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets.

Singh came to the White House from the New York Federal Reserve, where he played a critical leadership role in the emergency facilities the Fed launched in response to Covid-19.

Before his tenure at the Treasury Department, he worked for Goldman Sachs, with a focus on US interest rates and currency markets, from 2003 to 2007, and again from 2008 to 2011.

He was also a partner at Element Capital Management from 2007 to 2008. He is a former adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security and the Atlantic Council. He was also an adjunct professor of geoeconomics at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

READ: Daleep Singh among ‘Bloomberg 50’ who defined global business in 2022 (December 19, 2022)

Born in Olney, Maryland and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, he holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University in economics and public policy and a master of business administration/master of public administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, with a focus on international economics.