Michael Pettis Keynote Speaker

Michael Pettis is a finance professor at the Guanghua School of Peking University and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center.

Before moving to China in 2002 Pettis spent fifteen years on Wall Street running fixed-income trading and capital markets desks at JP Morgan, First Boston and Bear Stearns, where he advised Latin American, Asian and Eastern European governments on debt and balance sheet strategies.

During the last nine of these years he also taught finance, arbitrage, and economic history at Columbia University. His blog, China Financial Markets, was ranked by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top fifteen economic blogs worldwide, and is one of the reasons cited by Bloomberg-BusinessWeek for including him in its 2016 listing of The 50 Most Influential People In The World Of Finance.

He has published over 200 articles in various leading periodicals along with six books, the most recent of which, Trade War is Class War (Yale University Press 2020), was among 15 books longlisted by McKinsey/Financial Times for best book of 2020. In April 2021 it was also awarded the Lionel Gelber Prize.

His previous book, Avoiding the Fall: China’s Economic Restructuring, (Carnegie Endowment, 2013), was selected by the Financial Times as one of the top ten books on business and economics in 2013, while the one before that, The Great Rebalancing (Princeton University Press, 2013), was selected in 2018 among Barron’s “The 7 Best Books about the Financial Crisis”. He received an MBA in Finance and an MIA in Development Economics from Columbia University.