Édouard Tétreau

Education and career

Tétreau was born in Soissons, France, and attended the Jesuit school Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague in Paris. He graduated from HEC Paris in 1992 with a degree in entrepreneurship. He has worked for international organizations such as the European Council on Foreign Relations, AXA Private Equity in New York City, and Schroders in London.

In 2004, he founded Mediafin, a strategic consulting firm through which he advises a number of European industrial families, financial institutions and CEOs of European Fortune 500 companies.

A weekly columnist for French financial newspaper Les Échos, he writes on matters concerning politics, digital challenges, and finance, from a pro-European perspective. He is a regular television commentator and radio contributor on macroeconomic and policy issues.

Tétreau serves as a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a public policy organization based in Washington, D.C. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of La Maison Française at Columbia University and an affiliate professor at HEC Paris, where he taught a course titled 'Managing in times of financial crises.'

Writing

In his various articles in Le Monde and Le Figaro as well as in his column for Les Échos, and in his public interventions with the French Parliament, in China, and in New York City, Tétreau has repeatedly called for a “United States of Europe”.

In his book Analyste, published in 2005, Tétreau discusses the excesses and short-termism of the financial system during the internet bubble. Tétreau then published his second book 20 000 milliards de dollars upon his return to France in the fall of 2010, after having spent three years in New York City. The book discusses the national debt of the United States following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and the country's transition from the Bush to the Obama administration. It was later translated to Chinese (《二十万亿美元：强大美国的背后》出中文版) and published in China by China Citic Press.

Tétreau is also the author of Quand le dollar nous tue, published by Grasset in 2011.

His book, Au-delà du mur de l’argent, was published on 9 September 2015 by French publisher Stock. It follows an Autumn 2014 briefing paper for the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture, calling for an intervention of Pope Francis in New York in September 2015, during the Pope's scheduled visit to the U.S. The book warns of the risks of a major and imminent “accident” in the global economy. It offers concrete answers for an alternative economic model based upon ‘Pope Francis economics’ and various teachings from other religions, which, like many secular philosophies, give priority to the poorest and most fragile elements of our societies.

On 16 February 2016, in a much discussed opinion piece in Le Figaro, Tétreau described a Brexit as a "tremendous opportunity" for France, writing that an EU without Britain would be dominated by a Franco-German bloc that would be able to proceed with closer integration of the EU in a way that would not be possible if the UK were to remain. Tétreau argued that it was Britain that was most responsible for enlarging the European Union to include the nations of Eastern Europe as a way of weakening the Franco-German bloc which had dominated the European Economic Community (as the EU was known until 1993) since its founding with the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Tétreau maintained that none of the Eastern European nations should have been admitted to the EU, and that an EU without Britain would not take in new members that did not belong. Furthermore, Tétreau argued that it was the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe that caused the war in the Ukraine as it awakened "Russia's paranoia" and argued that British participation in the Iraq war had gratuitously damaged Europe's relations with the Muslim world. Tétreau maintained that an EU without the United Kingdom would have better relations with both Russia and the Muslim world. Finally, Tétreau argued that if a Brexit were to occur, it would allow the French to make Paris the financial and economic capital of Europe in place of London as a number of multinational firms, especially American firms would relocate to Paris in order to maintain access to the European common market.

Recognition

On March 16, 2000, as a financial analyst for Crédit Lyonnais, Tétreau published an analysis of an imminent internet crash titled "Take your e-profits before a potential e-crash." In "Mercury Rising," he predicted the danger of bankruptcy for Vivendi Universal, leading to the departure of Vivendi head Jean-Marie Messier.

In 2005, Tétreau received the Sénat Reader Prize for an Economics Book for his book Analyste: au cœur de la folie financière

On May 10, 2006, Tétreau spoke before the French Senate’s Commission on Finances, underlining the need for the French economy and society to prepare itself for an inevitable, brutal end to the period of financial excess and overabundance.

In China, where Tétreau’s last book was published in 2012, he became a 2013 Young Leader of the France China Foundation Programme.

Personal life

Tétreau is married with three children, and currently resides in Paris.