Bill Adams

William (Bill) Adams is senior vice president and chief economist at Comerica Bank. Bill leads Comerica’s Economics Department, providing research and analysis that impact the bank’s key markets, as well as business leaders and policy makers throughout the country.

Bill joined Comerica in 2022 after spending the previous 10 years with The PNC Financial Services Group, where he served as the senior vice president and senior manager economist. Bill contributed to forecasts and analysis of the U.S. national economy and regional economies within PNC’s core footprint. He also provided forecasts of international economic conditions, interest rates, and exchange rates, covering major foreign developed and developing economies. An expert financial forecaster, Bill’s exchange rate forecasts were ranked in the 90th percentile of Bloomberg’s forecast accuracy rankings when he left PNC. Prior to joining PNC, Bill was China resident economist for The Conference Board from 2009 to 2011.

He is co-author of In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade, published in 2013 by the Financial Times Press, and translated into Chinese in 2014 by Gusa Publishing (Taiwan). He is former president of the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, a local chapter of the National Association of Business Economics (NABE); a former associate of the University of Pittsburgh Asian Studies Center; and a former co-director of the Pittsburgh Warburg Chapter of the American Council on Germany.

Adams holds a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard.