Soumaya Keynes

Biography

Soumaya Keynes is an Economics Columnist at the Financial Times and host of their Economics Show podcast, and was previously the Britain Economics Editor for The Economist. Making complex economic issues from fiscal policy to trade accessible, even entertaining, her journalism has covered everything from the UK's struggles with productivity and growth to the cost-of-living and the economics of Freeports and AI.

Whilst at The Economist, Soumaya co-hosted the Money Talks podcast. Unravelling the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, the podcast twice won Best Business Podcast at the British Podcast Awards. She also served as The Economist's Europe Economics Editor and the Trade and Globalisation Editor. With Chad Bown, the former Chief Economist at the US State Department, she also co-hosted the podcast Trade Talks. Tim Harford named it as one of the best economics podcasts around, calling it a “nerdy (but witty) dive into the details of how trade negotiations and agreements work.”

Soumaya and Chad teamed up again to write the internationally acclaimed How to Win a Trade War - A Friendly Guide to an Unfriendly World. The book is an exploration of how the world came to rely on a complex, trillion-dollar trading system that was far more fragile than anyone cared to admit, until conflict, geopolitics and unpredictable political leadership started to challenge it. Throughout her work, Soumaya covers all aspects of macro and microeconomics, fiscal and central bank policy, wage and inequality. She also looks at how trade is being used by nations to achieve political objectives, as well as goals such as sustainability, workers’ rights and national security.

Soumaya has won an Association of Business Journalists' award for her writing on the costs of managed trade, and was nominated for a Press Gazette award for her writing about Britain's productivity problem. Before moving into journalism, she was a research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where she undertook academic research on the relationship between health and socioeconomic status, public finances and state pension reform, and was also a policy advisor at the Treasury.