Jaques Attali
Jacques Attali is a French economist and scholar. From 1981 to 1991, he was an advisor to President François Mitterrand. He subsequently cast doubt on Mitterrand's past as a mid-level Vichy government functionary in his retrospective of Mitterrand's career, C'était François Mitterrand, published in 2005.
In April 1991 he became the first President of the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the financial institution established by western governments to assist the countries of eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union in their transition to democratic market economies. He worked at the bank until 1993.
In 1998 Attali founded the French non-profit organization PlaNet Finance which focuses on microfinance.
Attali is perhaps best known in America as the author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music.
“What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector.”