Roger Bootle

Roger Bootle is one of the City of London’s best-known economists. He is the Senior Independent Advisor and Non-Executive Director of Capital Economics, which he founded in 1999, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries. From 1998 to 2017 Roger was a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Committee. He was formerly Group Chief Economist of HSBC and, under the previous Conservative government, he was appointed one of the Chancellor’s panel of Independent Economic Advisers, the so-called ‘Wise Men’. In 2012, Roger and a team from Capital Economics won the Wolfson Prize, the second biggest prize in Economics after the Nobel. Roger Bootle studied at Oxford University and then became a Lecturer in Economics at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Most of his subsequent career has been spent in the City of London. Roger has written many articles and several books on monetary economics. His latest book is The AI Economy – Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age. This follows Making a Success of Brexit which analyses what has gone wrong with the EU and what needs to be done to put it right, and The Trouble with Markets, which analyses the deep causes of the Global Financial Crisis and discusses the threats to capitalism arising from it. Like his previous book, Money for Nothing, which correctly anticipated the financial crisis, they have been widely acclaimed. His earlier book, The Death of Inflation, published in 1996, became a best-seller and was subsequently translated into nine languages. Roger is also joint author of the book Theory of Money, and author of Index-Linked Gilts. Roger appears frequently on television and radio and is also a regular columnist for The Daily Telegraph. In The Comment Awards 2012 he was named Economics Commentator of the year. Roger is a much sought after performer at conferences and business gatherings around the world. He has a long and distinguished record of successful forecasting of major events and market movements, often in contrast to the prevailing orthodoxy of the time, including:

• Perceiving that before the Great Recession real estate markets were caught up in a bubble.
• Foreseeing the serious impact of the credit crunch.
• Forecasting the collapse of the dotcom boom.
• Seeing that the UK would be forced out of the ERM in 1992 and, in contrast to the official Treasury line and most forecasters, predicting that inflation and interest rates would fall.
• Forecasting that rising inflation would prompt UK interest rates to be raised to 15% in 1989.
• Realising that during the “hard monetarist” phase in 1979-81, inflation was going to fall sharply despite the fact the broad money supply was growing rapidly.
• And most famously, predicting as early as October 1990, that the financial climate in Europe and North America would be transformed by sustained low inflation – and maintaining this view even though many people in the market dismissed “The Death of Inflation” as a joke.