I am pleased to announce that Detlev S. Schichter is now a Senior Fellow with The Cobden Centre.
He was born in 1964 in Bocholt, Northrhine-Westfalia, in Germany and studied economics and business administration at the University in Bochum, where he obtained a Diplom-Ökonom.
In 1990, he started his career at J.P. Morgan in Frankfurt as a derivatives trader. Four years later he moved within J.P. Morgan to the asset management division and became a manager of bond portfolios. In 1996, J.P. Morgan relocated him to London to work in their global bond team as a portfolio manager. After two years in that role he left J.P. Morgan and joined Mercury Asset Management in London, which subsequently became Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, and today is BlackRock. Here, Detlev was a director and head of the European bond team.
In 2001, he moved to Western Asset Management (Wamco), one the world’s premier bond firms, headquartered in Pasadena, California. He was head of the London-based investment team and senior portfolio manager on all global investment portfolios. When he left Western Asset Management in the summer of 2009, his team was in charge of $60 billion in client money from institutional investors around the world.
Significantly, Detlev first came across the Austrian School of Economics towards the end of his studies at university in Bochum. This encounter got him hooked and he became an ardent disciple of the Austrian School with Ludwig von Mises having the strongest intellectual influence on him.
The combination of appreciating the Austrians and experiencing financial markets each day as a practitioner (markets which became ever more unstable and ever more dependent on cheap credit) eventually led him to question the sustainability of current monetary arrangements.
Deciding to get out in 2009 and “think for himself”, he left Western Asset Management, rented a small writing office in St. John’s Wood, and began to think about the financial system in earnest. Crucially, he started to write his forthcoming book, Paper Money Collapse – The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown, which will be published by John Wiley & Sons in the U.S. and the UK in the Autumn of 2011.
Today, Detlev lives with his wife and three children in Hampstead, London.
