Kristen Fanarakis

Kristen Fanarakis leads the small business, entrepreneurship, and economic growth initiative at the Milken Institute. She focuses on macroeconomic and systemic trends affecting American small businesses and startups, and their implications for the economy and innovation.

Fanarakis began her career in investment management at Putnam Investments trading currency as an asset class. She then moved to Wall Street, where she worked for Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley in foreign exchange sales and trading, covering the leading institutional quantitative currency investment managers. After she left Wall Street, she comanaged the University of Maryland’s Center for Financial Policy, a Washington, DC-based think tank focused on the intersection of financial markets and regulatory policy.

She is also the founder of her own small business, Senza Tempo, a Los Angeles-made women’s luxury apparel brand. She regularly wrote and spoke on a variety of policy issues facing the domestic apparel industry, has been quoted in the press, testified before the California State Senate on behalf of other domestic apparel brands, and advocated for domestic manufacturing.