Mohamed El-Erian

Mohamed Aly El-Erian is an Egyptian-American economist and businessman. He is President of Queens' College, Cambridge, and chief economic adviser at Allianz, the corporate parent of PIMCO, where he was CEO and co-chief investment officer (2007–14). He was chair of President Obama's Global Development Council (2012–17), a columnist for Bloomberg View, and a contributing editor to the Financial Times.

Since 2014, he has been on the panel of experts that judged and selected the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year. He also regularly contributes to Project Syndicate, Yahoo! Finance, Business Insider, Fortune/CNN, and Foreign Policy. Named for four years in a row as one of Foreign Policy's "Top 100 Global Thinkers," he has written two New York Times Best Sellers, including, The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse, published in January 2016 by Random House. 

He co-chairs the capital campaign for Cambridge University with Sir Harvey McGrath. On July 1, 2019, El-Erian was appointed Senior Global Fellow at The Lauder Institute and part-time Professor of Practice at The Wharton School. El-Erian was born in New York City on August 19, 1958, to Egyptian parents Abdullah El-Erian and Nadia Shoukry, a cousin of Egyptian politician Ibrahim Shoukry. Shortly after his birth, the family moved back to Egypt, where El-Erian spent some of his early childhood along with short periods in Europe, where his father attended meetings of the UN law commission. 

In 1968, the family moved back to New York when his father took a position at the United Nations. From 1971–73, they lived in France, where El-Erian's father was the Egyptian Ambassador to France. After attending St John's School, Leatherhead, a boarding school in England, he gained a scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge, and received a bachelor's degree in economics in 1980. He later obtained a master's degree (1983) and a doctorate (1985) in economics from St Antony's College, Oxford. 

In June 2011, El-Erian received an honorary doctorate degree from the American University in Cairo. In December 2013, he became a Queens College, Cambridge, honorary fellow. El-Erian has served on the boards of trustees of several educational institutions, including Pegasus, St. Margaret School, Cambridge in America, and KAUST. He co-chairs the capital campaign for Cambridge University.

After his studies at Oxbridge, El-Erian settled in the US in 1983, taking a position at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., where he became deputy director. He moved to the private sector in January 1998, working in London at Salomon Smith Barney/Citigroup before being recruited by PIMCO to lead its work on emerging markets.

El-Erian worked for several years at PIMCO as a managing director and head of the emerging market portfolio team. He earned notoriety by avoiding the 2001 bond default by Argentina that otherwise stung the international bond market. Subsequently, he was appointed CEO and president of Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard's endowment and related accounts. 

He also served as a member of the faculty of Harvard Business School. As of 2020, he is a Harvard Global Advisory Council member. After twenty months at Harvard, El-Erian returned to PIMCO in December 2007 as CEO and co-CIO. As CEO of PIMCO, El-Erian was responsible for setting the firm's strategic direction and leading its operations globally. As co-CIO with PIMCO co-founder Bill H. Gross, El-Erian oversaw investment policies and strategies for all the company's portfolio management activities. 

He helped deliver investment performance for clients and grow PIMCO's assets under management from under $1 trillion to $2 trillion. On December 21, 2012, President Obama announced the appointment of El-Erian as the chair of the president's Global Development Council, leading the council in its role of informing and providing advice to the president and other senior U.S. officials on global development policies and practices.

On January 21, 2014, El-Erian resigned from PIMCO effective March of that year, stating he decided to leave after receiving a letter from his daughter outlining important events in her life that he missed. However, it was widely reported that his resignation was triggered by conflicts with Gross, raising questions about the company's succession plan as El-Erian was widely perceived as heir apparent to the 69-year-old Gross.

Despite this, El-Erian praised Gross as "a brilliant investor ... anchored by three things that you hardly ever find in an investor: Strong fundamentals including economics, a really good feel for the market, and strong bond math" when Gross departed Pimco. El-Erian remains a member of the parent company's (Allianz) international executive committee, chairs its International Advisory Committee, and is an advisor to the management board.

El-Erian has published widely on international economic and finance topics. He is a member of the Financial Times "A-List" of writers, has a monthly column in Foreign Policy, and is a contributing editor at the FT. He is also a regular op-ed contributor to Project Syndicate. His columns have appeared in The Atlantic, Bloomberg, The Economist, "Business Insider," Financial Times, Fortune, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial Express, and other outlets. He is a columnist for Bloomberg.

His first book, When Markets Collide, was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. The book won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2008, was named a book of the year by The Economist, and was called one of the best business books of all time by The Independent. His second book, The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse, was also a New York Times bestseller.