Dr Holger Schmieding is Chief Economist at Berenberg in Hamburg and London. Before joining Germany's oldest private bank in October 2010, he worked as chief Economist Europe at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch in London. Having studied economics in Munich, London and Kiel, he holds a doctorate from the University of Kiel. Before taking up his first role as financial market economist in 1993, he also worked as a journalist at "Westfälische Nachrichten" in Germany, as head of a research group on east-central Europe at the Kiel Institute of World Economics and as a desk economist at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC.

Holger Schmieding has repeatedly contributed to the policy debate in and about Germany and Europe. In 1998, he coined the term "Germany – the sick man of Europe" to warn that the country could be heading for a long period of low growth, high unemployment and elevated fiscal deficits unless it overcame its post-unification "Reformstau". Following the "Agenda 2010" and other reforms, he then predicted in 2010 a "golden decade" for Germany as a result of these changes, to be followed by a period of relative decline in the 2020s. In 2011, he predicted that the euro would not crack and that the ECB would eventually resolve the euro crisis by outing itself as a Fed-style lender of last resort.