Speaker Details
John Authers
Investment Editor, Financial Times
John Authers is the Investment Editor for the Financial Times. As such, he is the FT's principal commentator on markets and investments, responsible for the daily Short View and weekly Long View columns. He also writes columns for FT Fund Management and the FT's Wealth Quarterly, and contributes other commentary to the paper. He covers world markets, including stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, derivatives, wealth management, stock exchanges and fund management.
Previously, Authers served as US markets editor and before that Mexico City bureau chief where he covered the politics, economics, financial system and culture of Mexico and Central America.
Authers joined the FT in 1990. He later served as personal finance correspondent, and then education and local government correspondent (later education and training correspondent). From 1996 to 2000 he was New York correspondent, responsible for the "On Wall Street" column, and specializing in banking, insurance and fund management.
Prior to working at the FT, he contributed to the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian on the 1988 US presidential election.
Authers was named UTA National Journalist of the year in 1992 for his work revealing the mis-selling of life insurance products in the UK. Subsequently, in 1994, BTEC selected him as the National Newspaper Education Journalist of the Year. Authers was awarded a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Business and Economic Journalism from Columbia University in 1999, and in 2002, he won the Best of Knight-Bagehot Award for outstanding journalism by one of the 250 alumni of the program. In 2008, he received a SABEW Award in the online audio/visual category for his Short View reports on FT.com.
He is the author of The Victim's Fortune: Inside the Epic Battle Over the Debts of the Holocaust, co-authored with Richard Wolffe and published by Harper Collins (2002). He was also a researcher on Race for the Presidency 1988 published by CQ Press in Washington (1987).
Authers received his MBA from Columbia Business School and an MS from Columbia School of Journalism. He graduated from University College, Oxford, with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Authers is an avid singer, having been a member of the Philharmonic Chorus in London, where he sang in the backing chorus for Pavarotti and Cecilia Bartoli among others, as well as other choruses in New York and Mexico. He also enjoys hiking and his scalps include the summit of Kilimanjaro and the base camps of Everest and K2. As a trivia buff, Authers led the highest-scoring team in the history of the British TV quiz show University Challenge.
