Javier Milei speaking at a World Economic Forum event on Latin America in 2014 — Milei speaking at the World Economic Forum on Latin America, 2014 — years before his political career (World Economic Forum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

The Economist Years

Before the chainsaw: twenty years of banks, blackboards, and Austrian-school pamphlets.

Training

Milei graduated in economics from the University of Belgrano in 1993, then pursued postgraduate studies in economic theory at the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social (IDES) and a master’s in economics at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. His intellectual formation was the Austrian school — Mises, Hayek, Rothbard — absorbed in an Argentine economics profession then dominated by Keynesian and structuralist orthodoxies.

The jobs

Over roughly two decades Milei worked as a professional economist at:

Fundación Acordar — think-tank work in the 1990s.
HSBC — chief economist for Argentina around 2008.
Máxima AFJP — the private pension fund, before the 2008 nationalization of pensions.
Estudio Broda — the consultancy of Miguel Ángel Broda.
Corporación América (from 2008) — chief economist for Eduardo Eurnekian’s conglomerate, operator of airports across Latin America.

He also taught at the University of Buenos Aires and other institutions, and worked as a private consultant. Colleagues from these years describe a technically skilled monetary economist with heterodox — increasingly radical — views.

The books

Milei published collections of essays and polemics, including:

Lecturas de economía en tiempos de kirchnerismo (2014)
El camino del libertador (2014)
El fin de la inflación (2017)
Desenmascarando la mentira keynesiana (with Diego Giacomini, 2017)
Pandenomics (2020)

The books argue, in technical and then increasingly popular registers, that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon, that central banks are engines of poverty, and that Argentina’s decline is the product of a century of statism.

The turn to the public

By the mid-2010s Milei was a known quantity in Argentine economics circles — a frequent conference speaker (he addressed a World Economic Forum event on Latin America in 2014) and a prolific op-ed writer. Television discovered him around 2015, and the economist became the personality. See Media Personality.

Why this matters. Milei is unusual among populist leaders in arriving with genuine technical credentials in the field he now governs. Supporters cite the economist years as proof he understands the machine he is dismantling; critics reply that academic economics and governing are different skills — an attribution, not a verdict.

Source notes

Employment history from Argentine press profiles and Milei’s congressional CV.
Bibliography from publisher records (Unión Editorial, Galerna).