Alex Patelis served as Chief Economic Adviser from 2019 to 2024, advising Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on economic policy to advance Greece’s structural reform agenda and acting as liaison to the global investment community to attract foreign capital—a period during which Greece regained investment-grade status, cleaned up its banking system, and reduced its debt load.
With over three decades of experience as an economist, advisor, analyst, and strategist, Alex has worked in a variety of roles across London, New York and Athens.
Alex started his career with the US economics research team at Goldman Sachs & Co. in New York, where he worked under Bill Dudley, Chief US economist as well as a proprietary FICC trader in the same firm. In London, he joined Citigroup Asset Management as a quantitative economist. At Merrill Lynch, he held a variety of positions, including Global head of FX & Debt strategy, as well as Managing Director of Global Research, Head of International Economics. In this capacity, Alex managed the research teams responsible for the firm's outlook on all economies outside North America, including developed and emerging countries in EMEA, the Pacific Rim region and Latin America, as well as foreign exchange, local currency and external debt bonds. For their research, Alex and his team won a variety of awards, including from Extel and Institutional Investor. He was also Chief Economist at PSQR, a global discretionary macro hedge fund.
Prior to his public service, Alex was President of Patelis Macro, an independent research boutique he launched in 2010, which focused on global macroeconomic analysis providing strategic insights to select institutional clients around the world.
Alex earned a Ph.D. in Economics in 1997 from Princeton University, USA, where his thesis advisor was Professor Ben Bernanke. Titled “Asset returns and monetary policy”, part of his thesis was published in the Journal of Finance. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Mathematics from Sussex University, UK.
