Soumaya Keynes

Economics Columnist at Financial Times

Speaker

Soumaya Keynes is the Economics Columnist at the Financial Times. Her writing about the British economy includes Britain's struggle to get growth, the cost-of-living crisis, and the economics of Freeports. Soumaya analyses monetary and fiscal policy with analytical rigour with detailed reporting. She was nominated for a Press Gazette award for her writing about Britain's productivity problem. She co-hosted The Economist's Money Talks podcast, which twice won Best Business Podcast at the British Podcast Awards. It covered in-depth reporting the benefits of pay transparency, Europe’s energy crisis, and snarled supply chains. With Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, she co-hosted the podcast Trade Talks. Tim Harford named it as one of the best economics podcasts, calling it a “nerdy (but witty) dive into the details of how trade negotiations and agreements work.” In her work Soumaya has covered trade and globalisation. She wrote a special report exploring how trade policy is being used to achieve other objectives, including protecting the environment, promoting workers’ rights and national security. She won an Association of Business Journalists' award for comment for her writing on the costs of managed trade. Previously, Soumaya was a research economist at the Institute for Fiscal studies, where she did academic research on the relationship between health and socioeconomic status, and the public finances and state pension reform. She was also a policy advisor at HM Treasury.