Roger Bootle, Managing Director

Roger Bootle is one of the City of London’s best known economists, having worked in or around the financial markets since 1978. As well as being Managing Director of Capital Economics, he is also Economic Adviser to Deloitte a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Committee and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries. He was formerly Group Chief Economist at HSBC and, before the change of government, he was appointed one of the Chancellor’s panel of economic forecasters, the so-called “Wise Men”. He studied Economics at Oxford, and began his career in the academic world as a lecturer in Economics at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

He has written many articles and several books on monetary economics. Roger’s latest book, The Trouble with Markets, analyses the deep causes of the recent financial crisis and discusses the threats to capitalism arising from it. His previous book, Money for Nothing, correctly anticipated the financial crisis and has been widely acclaimed. This followed the success of The Death of Inflation, published in 1996, which became a best-seller and was subsequently translated into nine languages. Initially dismissed as extreme, The Death of Inflation is now widely recognised as prophetic. Roger is also joint author of the book Theory of Money, and author of Index-Linked Gilts.

Roger is a frequent performer at conferences and business gatherings around the world. (See Speaking Engagements.) He is a regular columnist for The Daily Telegraph and also appears frequently on national television and radio. Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian, recently wrote: “It seems strange that no place has yet been found on the MPC for Roger Bootle, one of the country’s leading monetary economists.”

Roger 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 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 the views of 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.