Alan Beattie

Alan Beattie is Senior Trade Writer at the Financial Times (FT). Based in London, he was previously the FT’s international economy editor and world trade editor, leading the paper’s coverage of trade policy and economic globalisation. He writes the Trade Secrets newsletter every Monday and an opinion column each Thursday in which he covers international trade, globalisation, and the intersection of geopolitics and economics.

Previous positions with the paper include economics leader writer, commenting on a wide variety of international and domestic economic issues in the editorial column, and two years in Washington DC as chief US economics correspondent, covering the US economy, the Federal Reserve and international economics and development, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Alan Beattie Joined the Financial Times in 1998 after working as an economist at the Bank of England and has worked in London, Washington, and Brussels, and reported from all over the world. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller False Economy, a brief and entertaining economic history of the world, and Who’s In Charge Here?, about policymakers’ response to the global financial crisis of 2008.

He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Cambridge and a BA from Oxford in Modern History.