The Big Crunch and the Big Bang. How to get out of the global financial mess

Saxon Brettell is Head of Research for the City of London Corporation. He is a leading UK economist with a career that spans private and public sectors. He has been a commodity forecaster, University lecturer, commercial manager of a business school and director of a leading economic forecasting consultancy.

John Llewellyn was Lehman Brothers’ Global Chief Economist from 1995 to 2006 and then Senior Economic Policy Advisor until 2008. Prior to that he worked for seventeen years at the OECD, first in charge of international economic forecasting and ultimately as head of the Secretary General’s private office.

Anatole Kaletsky is editor-at-large of The Times, where he writes a twice-weekly column on economics, politics and international relations. He is also a partner in GaveKal Research, a Hong Kong-based economic and financial consultancy.

Andy Ross is Deputy Director of the Government Economic Service, at HM Treasury. Previously a lecturer in economics and college director, Andy joined the civil service in 2000, when he jointly founded the Office of National Statistics micro-lab.

Michael Kitson is University Lecturer in global macroeconomics at the Judge Business School, Cambridge; Director of the Programme on Regional Innovation at the Cambridge-MIT Institute; Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge; and Research Associate of the Centre for Business Research, Cambridge. His research interests include, economic policy, regional economics, corporate performance, technology transfer and the commercialisation of science. He has undertaken major research projects for the UK Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills; the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts; the Economic and Social Research Council; and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He has also provided evidence as an expert witness for the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee’s enquiry into globalisation. His current work in concerned with assessing the factors that drive regional competitiveness and innovation.

Michelle Baddeley lectures on Behavioural Economics at the University of Cambridge. She is Director of Studies in Economics at Gonville and Caius College. She is also the Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme Trust funded project – Investigating herding and social influence in economic / financial decision-making using behavioural and neuroscientific techniques. She is author of Investment – Theories and Analysis (2003) and co-editor of a number of volumes including Economic Growth: New Directions in Theory and Policy (2007), The ‘New’ Monetary Policy: Implications & Relevance (2005), Globalisation, Regionalism and Economic Activity (2003) and What Global Economic Crisis? (2001/2004).

Luisa Corrado is a Marie-Curie Research Fellow at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. She is a macroeconomist who specialises in monetary and international economics. Her recent research focuses on the role of banking and the financial sector in monetary policy analysis, and especially how bank liquidity and central bank policies can explain the recent financial turmoil. Another area of research is the empirics of economic growth and its relationship with individual well-being.

William Keegan is the Observer’s senior economics commentator. He is a well known and highly respected financial journalist. He is a visiting Professor of journalism at Sheffield University and a Governor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. William Keegan’s books include The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown, Mrs Thatcher’s Economic Experiment, and Britain Without Oil.