Georges Ugeux

Early life

Born in 1945 in Belgium, Georges Ugeux's upbringing was both Walloon and Flemish . In the late 1960s he studied at Université Catholique de Louvain, graduating in Economics and Doctor of Law. He told newspaper Le Soir in 1995 that, at that time, he had been deeply troubled by the language feud known as Walen Buiten, and, consequently, he embraced the European ideal.

Career

Georges Ugeux began his financial career in 1970 at Société Générale de Banque, headquartered in Brussels, rising to the position of head of the investment banking and trust division. In 1985, he served as Managing Director of Morgan Stanley's mergers and acquisitions in London. In 1988, he was appointed Group Finance Director at Société Générale de Belgique. In 1992, he became President and Managing Director of Kidder, Peabody & Co. for Europe. In this role, he advises governments on privatization programs. He began serving as President of the European Investment Fund in June 1994. In 1995, he takes the helm of an organization, under the authority of Belgium's ministry of finance, that, as part of a privatization program that began in 1992, makes an inventory of government assets to be sold.

Georges Ugeux joined the New York Stock Exchange in September 1996, as Group Executive Vice President, International & Research, a financial news outlet labeling him "the face of the New York Stock Exchange outside of the United States". In 2003, he resigned amidst the NYSE compensation controversy. He claimed it was a coincidence because he had planned his departure in order to start a business, and defended his record as follows : "the NYSE listed 300 non-U.S. companies with a value of $2.7 trillion".

In 2003, Georges Ugeux founded an investment banking advisory firm, Galileo Global Advisors, and, since then, has been its CEO. The company caters primarily, but not exclusively, to Asian clients, such as the Guangzhou municipality.

In the wake of the 2009 legal fallout of Fortis, a Belgian financial services conglomerate, Georges Ugeux pursued the chairmanship of its board, but rapidly abandoned due to a deadlock in the negotiations between the different parties.

In 2011, Georges Ugeux' company joined the Institute of International Finance, which he doesn't see as banking lobby, and he was involved in the negotiations on Greece's debt restructuring, a saga that crystallized tensions in the Euro zone.

Writing

Georges Ugeux is a regular blog author for the Huffington Post and the author of a Le Monde blog, Démystifier la Finance, Ethiques et Marchés. In the second half of 2011, his blog rose to the heights of popularity, in its category, while its coverage focused on Greece's debt restructuring, the negotiations of which Georges Ugeux was privy to (see section on Career), and its deleterious effects on the eurozone. Sometimes, his writing contains vitriolic rhetoric: "In his Le Monde blog, Georges Ugeux asks if the French president is in reality the president of the French banks", reported Eurointelligence in October 2011.

Financial crisis

Georges Ugeux, who had promoted the NYSE's self-regulatory organization internationally as a senior official of the exchange, later deplored the "magistral failure" brought upon by the myth of auto-regulation in the financial sector, in 2009. This view is developed in a book published in 2010, The betrayal of finance: twelve reforms to restore confidence. , available in Dutch, English (2011) and French.

Eurozone debt crisis

Georges Ugeux stands in stark opposition to the claim of economists such as Paul Krugman (whom he accuses of making bold predictions out of concern for his own image) that Greece leaving the Eurozone, a topical issue in the middle of 2012, would have a net benefit for the country's economy. His reasoning is that the gains from a devaluation of the Greek drachma would be offset by the corresponding increase in the relative value of the outstanding debt in Euro (issued before the currency switch), whether public of private.

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