We are delighted to announce the next contributor to our speaker series: Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in conversation with Carrie Gracie, former China editor for the BBC. Martin and Carrie will discuss China, the West and the Future of the World Order. We hope one hour will be enough! There will be an opportunity for Q & A afterwards and all proceeds from this event will go to The ClementJames Centre.
When? Tuesday 20th April, 7 – 8 pm
Where? Online via Zoom (a link will be sent to you after registration)
Martin Wolf studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford. In 1971 he joined the World Bank, becoming a senior economist in 1974. By the start of the 80s, Wolf was deeply disillusioned with the Bank’s policies which had resulted in many developing countries suffering debt crises. He left the World Bank in 1981 to become director of studies at the Trade Policy Research Centre in London. He joined the Financial Times in 1987, where he has been associate editor since 1990 and chief economics commentator since 1996. Up until the late 2000s, Wolf was an influential advocate of globalisation and the free market.
Wolf is also an influential writer and his 2004 book, Why Globalisation Works, was written as a persuasive work rather than an academic study. By 2008, Wolf had become disillusioned with theories promoting what he came to see as an excessive reliance on the private sector. While remaining a pragmatist free of binding commitments to any one ideology, Wolf’s views partially shifted away from free market thinking and he became one of the more influential drivers of the 2008-2009 Keynesian resurgence. In late 2008 and early 2009, he used his platform at the Financial Times to advocate a massive fiscal and monetary response to the financial crisis of 2007-2010. His most recent book is The Shifts and The Shocks: What we’ve learned – and have still to learn – from the financial crisis (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2014).
His friends include leading financiers such as Mohamed A. El-Erian; politicians such as Manmohan Singh, Timothy Geithner and Ed Balls; many leading economists; and central bankers such as Mervyn King, former Head of the Bank of England. Despite Wolf’s close connections with the powerful, he is trusted for his independence and is widely regarded as one of the most influential economists journalists in the world.
We were very fortunate to welcome Carrie Gracie as a fascinating interviewee for ClementJames last year, and Carrie has very kindly agreed to return, this time as interviewer. Carrie was the BBC’s Beijing reporter in the early 1990s. She served as China correspondent and Beijing bureau chief until 1999, when she returned to the UK to focus on presenting, anchoring the morning slot on BBC News and hosting the BBC World Service programme, The Interview. In 2014, she took up a newly created post as BBC China editor and covered all key news stories in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She has also made documentaries about China for BBC TV and radio, her work winning prizes including a Peabody and an Emmy.
In January 2018, Carrie left her post as BBC China editor in protest an unequal pay, publishing an open letter to BBC audiences and giving evidence at a parliamentary select committee. She returned to BBC HQ as a news presenter and continued to campaign for an equal, fair and transparent pay structure at the national broadcaster before leaving in 2020. In September 2019 she published her first book Equal: How We Fix the Gender Pay Gap.