Aleš Michl – CNB Governor

Aleš Michl was born on 18 October 1977 in Prague. He studied at the Faculty of Finance and Accounting at the Prague University of Economics and Business (VŠE). He earned a Ph.D. in finance at VŠE in 2020, having graduated with a master’s degree from the same institution in 2002. Three years later, he completed a training programme on game theory and the psychology of decision-making at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in 2009, he took an investment portfolio management course at the Wharton School in Philadelphia.

From 2006 to 2015, he worked as an analyst and investment strategist at Raiffeisenbank. From February 2014, he served as an external economic adviser to the Czech Ministry of Finance, focusing on macroeconomic analysis and government debt stabilisation. 

He became a member of the CNB Bank Board on 1 December 2018. He was appointed Governor of the CNB for a six-year term effective from 1 July 2022.

When he took office, inflation in the Czech Republic stood at 17.5%, peaking at 18% a few months later – the highest rate since the transition to a market economy in the 1990s. Additionally, the bank was dealing with the largest loss in its history.

By spring 2023, the CNB had achieved the tightest monetary conditions in two decades, with the koruna reaching its strongest level in history. In February, March and June 2024, the CNB successfully reduced year-on-year inflation to the target of 2%, a level not seen since December 2018. The bank thus restored price stability in the country, fulfilling its statutory mandate. Aleš Michl was one of the first central bankers in Europe to deliver on this goal.

In 2023, the Governor started an extensive rationalisation process at the institution. In addition to reducing the top management team reporting directly to the Bank Board from 17 to 14 executive directors, this included cutting the total number of positions by 5.1% – the first comprehensive streamlining of the central bank’s operations in a decade.

Under Aleš Michl’s leadership, the CNB began purchasing gold and increasing the share of equities in its foreign exchange reserves. The goal is to enhance the expected return on the bank’s assets so that, in the future, these returns will exceed the expected costs of liabilities, thereby enabling the bank to recover from its financial losses. In addition, Aleš Michl became the first central bank governor in advanced countries to speak publicly about the possibility of investing part of the international reserves in Bitcoin. He emphasised that the idea was still at the analysis and discussion stage. At a Bank Board meeting in January 2025, he asked for an analysis to be conducted to assess the options for investing in additional asset classes.

In 2025, he was named Central Banker of the Year for Europe by The Banker and won the Governor of the Year award at the Central Banking Awards 2025.

Aleš Michl is not and has never been a member of a political party.