Jan Hatzius

Chief Economist — Goldman Sachs

Profile

Jan Hatzius is the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, and when he publishes a number, markets move. He runs Global Economics and Americas Macro Research, a perch he took over in 2011 after succeeding William Dudley as chief U.S. economist in 2005. He’s German-born, holds a DPhil from Oxford, and spent time at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance before joining Goldman in 1997. The reputation that made him the analyst Wall Street actually reads was built early — he flagged the housing market’s structural rot ahead of 2008 and walked away with two Lawrence R. Klein Awards for forecast accuracy.

For developers, Hatzius matters because his team produced what is still the most quoted economic estimate in the AI era. The March 2023 Goldman report The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth, authored under his shop by Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, is the source of the “AI could boost global GDP by 7%” line, the “300 million full-time jobs exposed to automation” line, and the “1.5 percentage points of annual U.S. productivity growth” line. Every CEO deck justifying AI capex traces back, directly or indirectly, to that PDF. It’s the document that turned generative AI from a tech-press story into a board-level capital allocation question.

What makes Hatzius interesting in 2026 is that he hasn’t ridden the hype curve. In late 2025 he went on the Atlantic Council’s podcast and on Bloomberg Odd Lots and said the contribution of AI investment to actual U.S. GDP growth in 2025 was “basically zero” — roughly 0.2 percentage points out of 2.2% — because most of the spend flows to Taiwanese and Korean semiconductor exporters, not domestic value-add. He still believes the long-run productivity story; he just refuses to pretend the J-curve has already kicked in.

That gap between the long-run thesis and the short-run reality is exactly what builders should pay attention to. The Goldman framework gives you the macro narrative your customers and investors are operating inside, while Hatzius’s own walk-backs tell you when the narrative is running ahead of the data. He’s the rare Wall Street voice who’ll publish the bullish number and then publicly puncture it eighteen months later when the prints don’t show up.