David Smith has been Economics Editor of The Sunday Times since 1989. He is also an assistant editor and policy adviser. He writes monthly columns for Management Today, Professional Investor and Industry Review, and is also a regular contributor to Financial World. Prior to joining The Sunday Times, he worked for The Times, Financial Weekly, Now! Magazine, the Henley Centre for Forecasting and Lloyds Bank. He is the author of several books, including Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics, The Age of Instability: The Global Financial Crisis and What Comes Next, The Dragon and the Elephant: China India and the New World Order, UK Current Economic Policy, Will Europe Work?, North and South: Britain’s Economic, Social and Political Divide, From Boom to Bust: Trial and Error in British Economic Policy, and Mrs Thatcher’s Economics. Visit his blog at economicsuk.com/blog.

Daniel Stedman Jones is a barrister. He was educated at the University of Oxford and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a PhD in history. He has worked as a policy adviser for the New Opportunities Fund and as a researcher for Demos. He is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics.

Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s Economics Editor and has been with the newspaper since 1988. His areas of speciality are the UK and global economy, trade and development. He was part of the group that put together the proposal for a Green New Deal, published by the New Economics Foundation in 2008. He is a visiting fellow at Hertfordshire University, a council member of the Overseas Development Institute and an adviser to the Catalyst thinktank and Red Pepper magazine. His most recent book (co-authored with Dan Atkinson) is Going South: Why Britain Will Have a Third World Economy by 2014. Visit his Guardian profile.

After a period of study and teaching at Oxford University, John Kay became Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where he established it as one of Britain’s most respected think tanks. He then shifted emphasis from public finance to business economics, taking a chair at the London Business School and establishing an economic consultancy, London Economics. In 1996 he became the founding Director of the Said Business School at Oxford University. Since leaving that institution in 1999, he has focussed on more popular writing, contributing a weekly column to the Financial Times and publishing several books of which the most recent is Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly. Visit his website at www.johnkay.com.

Rachel Lomax is a British economist who served as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 until 2008 and was a top civil servant. Before joining the Bank, Rachel was Permanent Secretary of three government departments between 1996 and 2002, including the Department of Work and Pensions and the Welsh Office as well as the Dept. for Transport. She was a Vice President and Chief of Staff to the President of the World Bank in 1995-6 and Head of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat at the Cabinet Office in 1994. In 2008 Rachel was appointed as a non-executive director of HSBC where she is also a member of several audit and risk committees.