Matthias "Max" Otte (born 7 October 1964) is an economist, publicist and political activist who holds German and U.S. citizenship.

In January 2022, Otte became provisorily expelled from the CDU when he was nominated by the right-wing populist party AfD as a candidate for the 2022 German presidential election.

Between 1986 and 1987, he spent a year abroad at the American University in Washington, D.C., on a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, where he majored in economic policy, finance and marketing.

After graduating from Princeton University with a Master of Arts in Public Affairs in 1991, Otte earned his doctorate there in 1997 with Aaron Friedberg's thesis "A Rising Middle Power?

"[7] Otte worked as a consultant for international organizations and the public sector at Kienbaum and Partners from 1989 to 1994 and was an employee of the Gütersloh Center for Higher Education (CHE) in 1995.

[9] He also helped establish the Executive MBA Program in Business Integration at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg from 2001 to 2005.

[14] From 2011 to 2016, he was a professor of quantitative and qualitative business analysis and diagnosis at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria.

Otte has published articles in newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Der Spiegel, Financial Times Deutschland, The Times, Harvard Business Review and Wirtschaftsdienst[14] and has appeared on television, with broadcasters such as ARD, ZDF, SWR, n-TV, Bloomberg and N24.

In 2021, he published his most personal book, In Search of Lost Germany, writing about his childhood, his parents, grandparents, and the people who influenced him.

[17][18][19] His first books appeared starting in 1989, initially publishing exclusively for the university field, such as on macroeconomics or general economic policy.

His first book outside of this field was America for Businessmen: das Einmaleins der ungeschriebenen Regeln, published by Campus-Verlag in 1996.

This was followed in July 2013 by the Max Otte Vermögensbildungsfonds AMI, launched by Ampega Investment, a fund exclusively for German investors, as Otte said he could no longer advise PI Global Value personally, but only through his Swiss "Privatinvestor" management company, due to his residence in Cologne and the tightened legal situation since the financial crisis.

The PI Global Value fund had beaten the DAX, EURO STOXX 50 as well as the MSCI World over its entire term until the end of 2016.

[39][40] In a hearing in the Finance Committee of the German Bundestag in 2010, Otte expressed the view that a financial transaction tax would lead to lower fees for money investors via reduced portfolio reallocations.

In the monetary policy of central banks, Otte sees planned economy[42] and drew comparisons to the final phase of the GDR.

At an event of the globalization-critical non-governmental organization Attac in August 2017, Otte criticized that politics had capitulated to the capital lobby.

[51] In 2018, the Oswald Spengler Prize, endowed by Otte and worth 10,000 euros, was awarded for the first time to Michel Houellebecq.

[56] During a protest rally over COVID-19 policies in Germany on 31 May 2020, Otte talked about an alleged connection between the COVID-19 pandemic and the abolition of cash payments.

Blume concludes that Otte mixes up nationalistic, racist and antisemitic allusions to convey his conspiracy beliefs.

[62] Before being nominated as the AfD candidate for the presidency, Max Otte donated at least 30,000 euros to the party, like research by NDR and WDR showed.

The event was attended by around 1,200 visitors and various speakers from the right-wing populist camp, including Jörg Meuthen, Thilo Sarrazin and Vera Lengsfeld, who wanted to continue the tradition of the Hambach Festival of 1832.

[65][66] Even before the event, Melanie Amann pointed out in Der Spiegel a method "in the right-wing milieu" of claiming historical dates and places for oneself and drawing one's own "actions as a logical continuation of the work of heroic role models."

[72] According to his website he is also a member of the Atlantik-Brücke, the German-American Business Club Frankfurt and the German Association for Financial Analysis and Asset Management.

He focuses in particular on whether the increase in power following the reunification has led to a shift in the style of the Federal Republic of Germany's foreign policy.

Thomas Berger described it as a "welcome contribution to the growing literature on German foreign policy", but criticised inconsistencies in Otte's realist framework and the author not operationalising "middle power".

[81] In his book Investieren statt Sparen Otte describes how private investors can achieve long-term wealth creation.

In addition, Otte describes the advantage internet offers for carrying out online bank transactions, automatically placing orders, as well as facilitating communication and exchange of information between investors.

However, if I have correctly understood the signals coming from the world economy, then it will have to crash – and with an enormous impact.Otte sees himself as a political economist in the tradition of Friedrich List, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke, and is inspired by the Austrian school of economic thought.

[clarification needed] Otte accurately forecast that the U.S. property market and subprime securities would spark the crisis.

He believes that there are several causes of the crisis: Moreover, Otte emphasizes that financial crises are not unusual in capitalism, however the majority of economists are reluctant to analyse them.