Indian American Daleep Singh Named to Bloomberg’s Annual List of People Who Defined Global Business This Year
- Joining President Biden’s former deputy national security advisor on Bloomberg 50 is Indian business tycoon Gautam Adani, the world’s third-richest person behind Bernard Arnault and Elon Musk.
Former Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh was named among ‘Bloomberg 50,’ an annual list of people in business, politics, science and technology, finance and entertainment “who defined global business” this year. Joining him is Indian businessman Gautam Adani, the world’s third-richest person behind Bernard Arnault and Elon Musk.
Appointed in February as a top national security adviser to the White House, Singh was central to U.S. and European efforts to cut off Russia from the global financial system after President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, freezing more than half of his $640 billion war chest. He quickly became the public face of the administration’s sanctions against Moscow. He was seen at the White House press briefings and his meetings and discussions with the president have been widely reported in the media. He is the great grand-nephew of Daleep Singh Saund, the first Asian-American elected to the U.S. Congress.
He was also deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for international affairs and acting Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets in the Obama administration. 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, Singh worked for Goldman Sachs, with a focus on U.S. 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 the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
He left the government in April and is now overseeing research at PGIM Fixed Income, which has $759 billion in assets under management.
This February, Adani, described by Bloomberg as “Asia’s busiest dealmaker,” overtook Indian compatriot Mukesh Ambani to become Asia’s richest man. “The $49 billion surge in his personal wealth this year has put him ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as well,” Bloomberg notes. “Now with a net worth of $125.5 billion—also surpassing Jeff Bezos—Adani is expanding his infrastructure conglomerate,” Bloomberg says. He has acquired assets such as Swiss cement giant Holcim Ltd.’s India units for $10 billion. Adani, who is close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, made” a hostile bid for broadcaster NDTV, one of the few media organizations in India willing to criticize the government,” which has “renewed concerns over press freedoms there,” Bloomberg notes.
A first-generation entrepreneur who dropped out of college, Adani started as a diamond trader in Mumbai and made most of his fortune in ports and mines, with his controversial investment in Australia’s Carmichael coal mine making him a target of environmentalists. His big bets—in cement and renewable energy, as well as airports and an expanded mining operation—have been funded by huge levels of debt. A unit of rating company Fitch Group Inc. flagged the “elevated” leverage in Adani’s business in a September report.