Sir Martin Jacomb was born in 1929. After Eton and Oxford, he was a barrister, before starting a career in business. He has been Vice-Chairman of Kleinwort Benson, Deputy Chairman of Barclays and was Chairman of the Canary Wharf Group, the London Docklands property company, during the epic takeover battle of the early 2000s. Sir Martin has also held senior board position at Rio Tinto and Marks and Spencer, been Chairman of Prudential and served on the Court of the Bank of England.

Lend Me Your Ear

SIR MARTIN JACOMB - CITY FINANCIER - FEBRUARY 2020

John Rossman is a US tech entrepreneur who worked alongside Jeff Bezos as he built Amazon. America’s third most valuable company after Microsoft and Apple, Amazon has a stock market value approaching a trillion dollars – bigger than the national income of Switzerland, Taiwan, Sweden and all but 17 countries in the world. The company accounts for almost half of all US internet-based retailing, up from less than a fifth back in 2011. And this e-commerce giant – whose activities now range from retailing to entertainment, health and life sciences – is increasingly in the firing line, over subjects including data use, market power and tax. John Rossman, who launched and led some of Amazon’s most important divisions, provides insightful analysis on all these issues and more. We also discuss his book - "Think Like Amazon: 50 and a half ideas to become a Digital Leader" This interview was written up in The Telegraph on Sunday 13th October 2019 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/10/12/amazons-success-stifling-future-innovators/

JOHN ROSSMAN - AMAZON INSIDER - OCTOBER 2019

Jonathan Tepper is the co-author of "The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition". In his book, Tepper describes how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives – from health insurance, to many consumer goods and also tech giants like Google and Facebook and Amazon. “Every day, ordinary people transfer their money to monopolists and oligopolists” says Tepper – proposing instead vigorous anti-trust legislation to return America and other Western nations including the UK to an era when competition created higher economic growth, more jobs and higher wages, and more start-up companies too. As a founder of several companies himself, with a background in both finance and citizen journalism, this is a story Tepper is well-qualified to tell.

JONATHAN TEPPER - AUTHOR OF "THE MYTH OF CAPITALISM" - DECEMBER 2018

Elisabeth Schimpfössl is the author of “Rich Russians – from Oligarchs to Bourgeoise” – an eye-catching study of the new Russian business elite that’s emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Originally from Austria, and now an academic at the UK’s Aston University, Schimpfössl enticed dozens of so-called oligarchs and minigarchs to discuss their personal stories, how they acquired wealth, their views on Western culture – and the future of East-West relations during what some now call “a New Cold War”. “Schimpfössl’s book benefits from this long parade of interviews” says Foreign Affairs magazine, “which put a human face on her analysis”. Her analysis is one of robber barons becoming gentlemen, of a rush to be seen as refined and bourgeoise, of “the man’s world” in post-Soviet Russia, but also of “powerful, unstoppable” Russian women.

ELISABETH SCHIMPFOSSL - AUTHOR OF "RICH RUSSIANS" - NOVEMBER 2018

James Barr is the author of “A Line in the Sand” – a riveting book on how British and French diplomats re-made the map of the Middle East during and after the First World War. This British historian tells a tale of hubris and political skulduggery, as two colonial powers cooked up the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing the region by drawing a line across Syria, from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier. Now Barr has written a follow-on book – Lords of the Desert – about the UK and America competing for influence across the Arab World during and after the Second World War. “People have been fighting over Syria for as long as we have written records,” he says, during this wide-ranging discussion on post-colonialism and pipeline politics. Amidst today’s tragic Syrian conflict, with foreign powers still vying to control the region, Barr’s beautifully written books are of huge relevance.

JAMES BARR - HISTORIAN OF THE MIDDLE EAST - OCTOBER 2018

Nomi Prins is a former senior banker with firms including Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. She left Wall Street in 2001 as “life was too short” and because of her “disgust at how citizens everywhere had become collateral damage, and later hostages, to the banking system”. Since then, Prins has written countless articles and a string of books that are highly critical of the bankers, policy makers and regulators that control high finance. Her latest book – Collusion – takes aim at the controversial money-printing programme known as quantitative easing, or QE. “What’s happened over the last 10 years in terms of QE is socialism for the banks,” Prins told me, when I met her in a coffee shop in London "Ridiculously," she says, "the emergency period has lasted ten years, with QE driving inequality and creating a cloud of looming debt”. An article based on this interview appeared on the website Unherd.com https://unherd.com/2018/06/nomi-prins-central-banking-heist-put-world-risk/

NOMI PRINS - ECONOMIST & CAMPAIGNER - OCTOBER 2018

Michael Jacobs is an economist and political scientist who is currently the Director of the Commission on Economic Justice at the UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research. Among the UK's leading left-wing thinkers, Michael was previously an economic advisor to Gordon Brown’s Labour government and a member of Britain’s Council of Economic Advisors. Prior to that, he was the Director of The Fabian Society. Having just published the IPPR Commission’s 304-page report, Michael says the decline in UK living standards since the financial crisis has been “really quite remarkable” – and highlights the importance of company-level profit sharing in an increasingly automated economy. Also a confidant of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, MichaelJacobs says centrist thinkers in British politics have “lost their way” and the old categories of left and right are “now too simplistic”.

MICHAEL JACOBS - IPPR ECONOMIST & POLITICAL SCIENTIST - SEPTEMBER 2018

Peter Platzer is the Founder and CEO of Spire. Since 2012, Spire has built a constellation of almost 60 nano-satellites that collect observations under various headings and, in Platzer’s words, read the weather by looking at the refraction of GPS signals. A trained physicist, who studied at CERN and the Max Planck Institute, Platzer hails from Austria and used to work on Wall street, but left to pursue his scientific and commercial dream – pioneering small-scale satellites. You’ve heard of big data, Platzer is a pioneer of celestial even extra-celestial data – a frontier issue of vast commercial, strategic, moral and perhaps philosophical importance.

PETER PLATZER - SPACE ENTREPRENEUR - APRIL 2018

Helen Thomas is the London-based analyst and businesswoman behind the financial consultancy "Blonde Money". A former advisor to Chancellor George Osborne, Thomas is a genuine political insider. Yet unusually, she combines political smarts with serious financial expertise, as a former currency trader and CFA charterholder. In this discussion, recorded in a pub in the City of London close to Blonde Money's offices, Thomas explains the damage done by quantitative easing and why developed markets are becoming more like emerging markets. In her view, the biggest systemic risk to global markets is now posed by ETFs – those ubiquitous Exchange Traded Funds.

HELEN THOMAS - "BLONDE MONEY" - MARCH 2018

Ray Bassett is a Former Irish Ambassador who served as a senior Advisor to successive Irish Prime Ministers. Originally from Dublin, Bassett has a PhD in Biochemistry from Trinity College, Dublin but spent almost his entire career in the Irish civil service. A key back-room figure during the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, he knows the UK – and British politics – well. While disappointed that the UK voted for Brexit, since retiring form the Civil Service in 2016, Bassett has been alarmed by the stance his government and country have taken – particularly towards the Irish border. In this interview, he explains why, in his view, the Irish government should just sit down with the British and solve this issue – and if that means breaking a few EU rules, so be it.

RAY BASSETT - FORMER IRISH AMBASSADOR - FEBRUARY 2018

Roberto Azevedo is the Director General of the World Trade Organisation. He is the world's most important trade diplomat - and runs arguably the most important economic multilateral organisation on earth. In this rare interview, conducted at the WTO's Geneva Headquarters, Brazillian-born Azevedo discusses Donald Trump and the threat of global protectionism and the future of multi-lateral trade deals. He also weighs in on Brexit - and the prospect of the UK trading under WTO rules with the rest of the EU, once Britain leaves in March 2019. Trading under WTO rules is often presented as 'a disaster for the UK'. Azevedo, in contrast, says such an arrangement would be 'perfectly manageable' and 'not the end of the world'. Total listening time: 20 minutes

ROBERTO AZEVEDO - WTO DIRECTOR-GENERAL - DECEMBER 2017

Professor Amartya Sen is an economist and anti-poverty campaigner. Probably the world’s most celebrated living economist, Sen grew up in what was called British India in the 1930s, in modern day Bangladesh. Having witnessed famine and religious conflict as a boy, he studied economics at Cambridge and then, fired by injustice, as a prolific writer, speaker and advisor to many governments, he has since promoted economic policies focused mainly on poverty-alleviation and the functioning of democratic institutions across the developing world. Now a Professor at Harvard, and a Nobel Laureate, Sen is often labeled “the conscience of the economics profession”. In this podcast, Amartya Sen and Liam Halligan discuss, Trump, Brexit and Sen’s memories of taking tea with EM Forster.

PROF AMARTYA SEN - NOBEL LAUREATE ECONOMIST - JANUARY 2017

Professor Stephanie Kelton is one of America’s leading economists. Until recently she was Chief Economist to the US Senate Budget Committee, before quitting her job to become the lead economic advisor to Bernie Sanders during his Democrat Party Nomination Campaign. In this interview, which took place during the annual Kilkenomics festival in Ireland, where Professor Kelton is a highly-regarded regular, she talks about Donald Trump’s victory, her wish to see the “insane spending sequester” repealed, how “all bets are off when it comes to America’s deficit” and why the incoming President's “wall between America and Mexico" won’t be built. Currently chairing the Economics Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Professor Kelton gives her views on why Hillary Clinton lost and why Bernie Sanders will continue to be "a fighter".

PROF STEPHANIE KELTON - BERNIE SANDERS' CHIEF ECONOMIC ADVISOR - NOVEMBER 2016

Gillian Caldwell is CEO of Global Witness, one of the world's most widely-respected and influential campaigning NGOs. Global Witness boasts a 23-year trade record of working to expose and break the links between natural resource exploitation and poverty, corruption and environmental and human rights abuses worldwide. A trained lawyer, Caldwell moved from her native America to London in 2015, in order to lead Global Witness. In this extended interview, she discusses the dangers faced by her staff when working in some of the world's most politically unstable countries, while giving her thoughts on Brexit and the increasing reliance of media organisations on investigative NGOs. An Amnesty International activist since the age of 12, Caldwell doesn't shy away from identifying "our own hypocrisy and inconsistency in diplomatic relationships", pointing to the role of Western nations in "enabling corruption elsewhere" and the determination of Global Witness to "follow the dollars back home". Referring to her fondness of the UK, she also relays her experiences of navigating the “sometimes substantial cultural differences” between British and American culture.

GILLIAN CALDWELL - CEO, GLOBAL WITNESS - SEPTEMBER 2016

The son of diplomat, Jeremy Browne rose from being a Liberal Democrat press office to being elected as MP for Taunton Deane - and then Minister of State at both the Foreign Office and the Home Office under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Jeremy is now the City of London’s "Special Representative” to the European Union – which puts him at the heart of the UK’s negotiations on Brexit. A genuine political insider, though no longer bound by the constraints of office, Jeremy gives us his response to the Brexit vote. Drawing on his book "Race Plan: an authentic Liberal plan to prepare Britain for the global race", Jeremy shares his vision of how the UK, and in particular the City, can thrive outside the EU

JEREMY BROWNE - JULY 2016

Lend Me Your Ear is a series of extended one-to-one interviews with economists, politicians, policy makers and entrepreneurs conducted by Liam Halligan. Our guests range from leading academics to campaigners, opinion-formers and front-line lawmakers – all of whom share an interest in the interaction of economics and politics, that vital interface between ideas and vested interests where policy is made. In each episode, Liam leads an informal yet detailed discussion, a conversation designed to inform, illuminate and entertain. If you like what you hear, please subscribe – and encourage others to do the same. Lend Me Your Ear – Conversations Worth Hearing.

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