Oct 24 2008
Roger Bootle
Leading Authority on the World Economy and Former Chief Economist at HSBC
One of the City of London’s best-known economists, Roger Bootle runs the consultancy, Capital Economics, which specialises in macroeconomics and the economics of the property market. He is also Economic Adviser to Deloitte, a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Committee and a Visiting Professor at Manchester Business School.
“Some of the greatest blunders occur not through errors of fact, but errors of logic”
He was formerly Group Chief Economist of the HSBC Group and, before the change of government, he was a member of the former Chancellor’s panel of Independent Economic Advisers, the so-called “Wise Men”. A regular columnist on The Sunday Telegraph, Roger also appears frequently on national television and radio.[/expand]
Roger Bootle’s expertise on World and European economics is a valuable source of information for decision makers around the globe. Business leaders will benefit from his astute insights and analytical brilliance of the economic landscape.[/expand]
An engaging and informative speaker, Roger uses his wealth of experience to give audiences valuable insights into the current state of global economics. He is witty, incisive and to the point making him highly sought-after as a keynote and conference speaker. [/expand]
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Lode Beckers is an international financier and banker. After a 28-year corporate banking career with Citibank in 7 countries, Lode became a board member in two private banks – in Belgium and France -, while founding LOBO N.V., a fund management firm and consulting firm focusing on Euro-related strategic and organisational matters.
Prof. Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor and a Novartis Fellow at Harvard Business School. Currently, he teaches in Harvard’s comprehensive general management executive education programs. His current research focuses on understanding the drivers of entrepreneurship worldwide.
In January 2006 he left Arthur D. Little’s Asia Pacific Advisory Council, where he was Vice Chairman providing council on high level strategic and operational issues for companies in the Asia Pacific region.
Dr. Kenichi Ohmae is an acclaimed management strategist renowned for his work on globalisation and the borderless economy. He is a concert playing flutist, a nuclear physicist, would-be politician, a former McKinsey consultant and much more. He is also the dean of two private schools in Tokyo: Isshinjuku, which studies public policy, and Attacker’s Advantage, which studies Entrepreneurship. He is also the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public and Social Research.
James Kynge is Editor of China Confidential, a specialist research service at the Financial Times that focuses on the Chinese economy. He has spent 16 of the last 25 years living in China, first as a Reuters reporter in the 1980s, then as the FT Bureau Chief in Beijing for seven years until 2005, and subsequently as an executive heading up the Pearson Group of companies’ operations in the PRC. His award-winning 2006 book, ‘China Shakes the World’, was an international bestseller, translated into 19 languages. 
John A. Caslione is a global business specialist.
Andrew Gowers has a lifetime’s experience in newspapers and on the front-line of corporate crises in Britain, Europe and the US. A financial journalist for 25 years, most of them at the Financial Times, as Editor, and Foreign, and Middle East Editor, he went onto work in corporate communications, first at the global investment bank Lehman Brothers and then at BP – closely involved in the two most high-profile corporate crises of recent decades. He was Head of Corporate Communications and Brand at Lehman Brothers when the bank spectacularly collapsed in 2008, triggering the global financial crisis. After a stint at London Business School, he joined the oil giant BP as Head of Group Media, and was part of the company’s communications response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. 
In 1976, Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank to make loans to poor Bangladeshis. Since then the Grameen Bank has issued more than US$ 5.1 billion to 5.3 million borrowers. The success of the Grameen model has inspired similar efforts throughout the developing world and even in industrialized nations including the USA. His methods have also been applied to Burma and in Kosovo with great success and he is now embarking upon an effort to eliminate global poverty.
Professor Muhammad Yunus has been ranked among the top 50 most influential business thinkers. In 2009 Thinkers 50, the global ranking of management gurus, placed him among the list of most influential thinkers
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