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John Plender

John Plender has been a senior editorial writer and columnist at the Financial Times since 1981, an assignment he combined until recently with current affairs broadcasting for the BBC and Channel Four. He has a weekly column on economics and business on Mondays and also writes for the opinion pages.

After taking his degree at Oxford University John Plender joined Deloitte Plender Griffiths in the City of London in 1967, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1970. He then moved into journalism, becoming financial editor of The Economist in 1974 where he remained until taking up a governmental appointment in the Foreign Office policy planning staff in 1980.

John Plender was the winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for excellence in financial journalism in 1994. His books include That’s The Way The Money Goes (Andre Deutsch, 1982), The Square Mile, with Paul Wallace, (Hutchinson, 1984), A Stake In The Future (Nicholas Brealey, 1997) and Going Off The Rails - Global Capital And The Crisis Of Legitimacy (John Wiley, 2003)

Comment on a John Plender column - -

How China’s citizens could provide a prop for US equities

Beijing should allow individuals to export capital. The US could absorb the resulting flow via equity rather than debt markets

Mind the gap

As financial crisis leaves Anglo-American capitalism looking tarnished, a period in which rising inequality and stagnant average incomes seemed tolerable to voters may be coming to an end

Upheavals push the chancellor to the sidelines

No working group could hope to crack the real problem, which is that risk is being repriced across the world, writes John Plender

Shareholder activism raises questions of responsibility

Director liability and shareholder responsibility need a rethink in a world where activists demand an ever bigger say in decisions

Is fair value accounting a blessing or a curse?

On the face of it, an approach whereby assets and liabilities are marked to market looks logical when the emphasis of the banking system has shifted from deposit taking and lending to providing credit via securities markets.

Insight: Advantages in fostering ethical culture

If the reward system and culture of a bank is at odds with best ethical practice, ethics have no chance, writes John Plender

Greatest danger lies in consumer recession

The initial market response to the Fed’s cut and any that may follow matters less than the more fundamental question of whether a monetary remedy is capable of addressing the intractability of the economic problem, writes John Plender

Insight: China’s investment traffic needs liberalising

There is an exceptionally busy traffic at present between the developed and the developing world in equity investment, writes John Plender

Post credit bubble wealth transfer will beggar belief

When financial market bubbles burst, a transfer of assets from the weak to the strong invariably follows. The unprecedented scale of the credit bubble suggests the extent of the resulting wealth transfer will beggar belief, writes John Plender

Market insight: Goldman offers example of governance

It’s clear bank governance badly needs a rethink. With its distinctive model, Goldman offers food for thought, writes John Plender

Insight: The pitfalls of financial globalisation grow clearer