John Authers
Mexico City Bureau Chief
Financial Times
Panelist: The Hispanic Market
John Authers has been the Mexico City bureau chief for the Financial Times since December 2001, responsible for covering political and economic developments in Mexico and Central America. He was born in 1966, and joined the paper in 1990.
From August 1996 until moving to Mexico, he was based in New York, primarily covering the banking industry and Wall Street, as well as initiating the FT's special US coverage of fund management. From April 1993 until leaving for New York, he was the paper's education correspondent, based in London, and was also responsible for covering training, and British municipal government.
On joining the FT in January 1990, he worked first as a general reporter, covering then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's attempt to introduce a poll tax, and subsequently covering the fund management and life assurance sectors.
He is a graduate in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from University College, Oxford, and also holds a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
He is the author of The Victim's Fortune: Inside the Epic Battle Over the Debts of the Holocaust , published in New York by HarperCollins in June 2002, a study of the recent campaign by Holocaust survivors to gain restitution from banks and European governments.
Among educational awards, he received the English-Speaking Union exchange scholarship, which allowed him to spend a year at school in Boston after graduating from high school in the UK, and subsequently received a further award from them allowing him to spend the summer of 1987 working as an editorial assistant at Congressional Quarterly magazine in Washington, DC. He won a prestigious Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism to attend Columbia journalism school, and was subsequently awarded the George Wiegers fellowship, which paid full tuition costs for the MBA. He was elected to the Beta Gamma Sigma business school honors society, and appeared on the Dean's List at Columbia.
Journalistic awards include the UK's Unit Trust Association's national journalist of the year in 1992, for his campaigning work on the mis-selling of insurance products (which was also cited by parliamentary committees and helped lead to changes in legislation), the UK's Business and Technology Education Council's national journalist of the year in 1994, for work on changes to training in the UK, and the “Best of Knight-Bagehot” award of 2002, awarded for the “most outstanding” journalism by an alumnus of the Knight-Bagehot fellowship.
Among other activities, he is also a semi-professional singer, whose voice has appeared on more than a dozen CDs. He has sung in the chorus for such soloists as Luciano Pavarotti and Cecilia Bartoli, and under conductors including James Levine and Kurt Masur.
