Brian Judge is the research director of the Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at BESI, where he leads research on how finance drives inequality and erodes democratic governance. His current work focuses central bank digital currencies and using large language models to demystify public budget documents. His first book, Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores how finance reshaped American political economy. His next book project, The Economy of Knowledge, examines how economic knowledge both constructs and constrains what can be known about what we call “the economy.” He has published in Policy & Society, New Political Economy, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Brian holds a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley and was a policy fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Before academia, he was a portfolio analyst at a hedge fund.