Mohamed El-Erian

Mohamed El-Erian was born in New York to Egyptian parents, grew up in Egypt and France, and studied economics at Cambridge University and Oxford University where he received his DPhil. He spent 15 years at the International Monetary Fund before joining PIMCO in 1999. He served as CEO of Harvard Management Company from 2006 to 2008 before returning to PIMCO as CEO and Co-CIO alongside Bill Gross. During his tenure PIMCO grew to manage approximately $2 trillion in assets, making it the world's largest bond fund manager. El-Erian coined the term "New Normal" in 2009 to describe the period of sustained below-trend economic growth, high unemployment, deleveraging, and new regulatory constraints that he predicted would characterise the post-2008 global economy — a framework widely adopted by investors and policymakers. He left PIMCO in 2014 after a highly publicised falling out with Bill Gross. He subsequently served as chief economic adviser to Allianz, PIMCO's parent company, and became President of Queens' College Cambridge. El-Erian is one of the most widely read financial commentators, writing a regular column for Bloomberg and contributing to the Financial Times. His books "When Markets Collide" (2008) and "The Only Game in Town" (2016) are widely read analyses of global economic dynamics and central bank policy.