Michel Santi is a French-Swiss economist, financier, writer, and advisor to central banks and sovereign wealth funds. Born in Beirut to a Franco-Lebanese family, he grew up between the Middle East and Europe before beginning his financial career in 1986 at Banque Indosuez in Geneva. He later worked for the Royal Bank of Canada, Discount Bank & Trust, and the BNP Group in Switzerland, before co-founding in 1993 one of Geneva’s first independent asset-management companies, where he created several hedge funds, including some of the largest currency and derivatives funds of their time.
In 2005, he left operational finance to devote himself fully to macroeconomic analysis and strategic advisory work for public institutions. A former professor of financial techniques at the University of Geneva, he has been writing a widely followed blog since 2007 and a weekly macroeconomic and geopolitical column for La Tribune. The author of several books on financial crises, he was among the first to alert readers to the subprime crisis, and has been described by Edgar Morin as a “visionary economist.”
Santi’s work offers a forceful critique of neoliberalism, austerity policies, and the dominance of financial markets. He advocates a strong role for the state and central banks, monetary creation as a tool for stimulus, productive public debt, and innovative monetary policies such as negative interest rates. A proponent of the gradual disappearance of cash—on which he has advised several Scandinavian countries—he argues that capitalism must be reshaped to serve social cohesion. His books Capitalism Without Conscience (Oxford), Splendeurs et misères du libéralisme, and Le Testament d’un économiste désabusé denounce what he views as the moral drift of contemporary economic systems.
He recently published Une jeunesse levantine, a vivid and deeply personal memoir recounting seven formative years of his youth in the Middle East. In it, he describes encounters with Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, and Shimon Peres; his involvement in a radical Christian militia during the Lebanese Civil War; and the extraordinary story of his cousin—Miss Universe—who married the mastermind of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack, whom Santi met in Lebanon. Blending intimate memory with regional history, the book sheds light on how his early exposure to geopolitical turmoil profoundly shaped his economic thinking.
An experienced practitioner turned engaged critic, Michel Santi is a founding member of Finance Watch in Brussels, a Senior Member of LIFE (Lebanese International Financial Executives), and a former member of the World Economic Forum and the Institut Français des Relations Internationales. He also co-founded “Art Trading & Finance” in Geneva in 2015, advising art investors and collectors. He holds a specialized master’s degree in economic and banking law and advocates an economy centered on human needs, insisting that “economics is fundamentally a political affair.”