Linda Yueh
Boards are being asked to make capital decisions inside a fractured global system: tariffs, currency swings, sanctions exposure, and the slow tail of post-pandemic debt. Most economic commentary either oversimplifies the shock or buries it in jargon. Leaders need a clear read on what is cyclical, what is structural, and what to do about each.
Linda Yueh is an Oxford and London Business School economist who helps boards interpret global economic shocks, financial crises, and the shifting rules of trade with China, the US, and Europe.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Linda Yueh
- A published framework for spotting and mitigating financial crashes, drawn from her book The Great Crashes and applied directly to board-level risk and capital allocation conversations.
- Sitting non-executive director on three FTSE 100 boards (Rentokil Initial, SEGRO, Standard Chartered), which means she reads the macro picture the way a director has to read it, not the way a commentator does.
- Direct working experience with the World Bank, European Commission, Asian Development Bank and the UK Treasury review panel, which lets her translate policy direction into commercial implication.
- A China specialism with academic depth: D.Phil. economics at Oxford, former Visiting Professor of Economics at Peking University, and author of China’s Growth: The Making of an Economic Superpower (Oxford University Press).
- Broadcaster’s instinct for clarity, sharpened by years as Chief Business Correspondent for BBC News and Economics Editor at Bloomberg Television, so the analysis lands with a non-specialist audience.
Biography highlights
- Fellow in Economics, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, and Adjunct Professor of Economics, London Business School.
- CBE for Services to Economics, King’s New Year’s Honours List 2023.
- Author/editor of 11 books, including The Great Crashes (Penguin Business), selected by the Financial Times as one of the Best New Books in Economics.
- Non-Executive Director of Rentokil Initial, SEGRO, and Standard Chartered; Chair of Baillie Gifford’s Schiehallion Fund.
- Former Chief Business Correspondent, BBC News, presenting Talking Business with Linda Yueh; former Economics Editor, Bloomberg Television.
- Associate Fellow, Chatham House; columnist for The Times, the Financial Times and The New York Times; advisor to the World Economic Forum, World Bank, European Commission and Asian Development Bank.
Biography
The financial crashes of the past forty years all rhyme. Currency crises in the 1980s, Japan’s housing bust, the dot-com unwind, 2008 and the pandemic each followed a recognisable arc, and in The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns and How to Prevent Them, Linda Yueh sets out a three-step framework that boards and policymakers can use to read the early signals. Penguin Business published it in 2023 and the Financial Times selected it as one of its Best New Books in Economics.
The analysis is grounded in serious academic work. Yueh holds a D.Phil. in economics from the University of Oxford, where she is Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, and she is Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School. Her earlier book The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today was named one of The Times’s Business Books of the Year, and the US edition was a Newsweek Best Book of the Year. China’s Growth: The Making of an Economic Superpower was published by Oxford University Press.
What separates her from most academic economists is the directness of her commercial vantage point. She sits as a non-executive director on the boards of Rentokil Initial, SEGRO and Standard Chartered, and chairs Baillie Gifford’s Schiehallion Fund Ltd. She has advised the World Bank, the European Commission, the Asian Development Bank, the World Economic Forum and the UK Treasury review panel, and she is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House.
She communicates for a living. As Chief Business Correspondent for BBC News she hosted Talking Business with Linda Yueh, and before that she was Economics Editor at Bloomberg Television. She writes regularly for The Times, the Financial Times and The New York Times. In 2023 she was appointed CBE for Services to Economics.
Key speaking topics
- Global economic outlook and macroeconomic risk
- Financial crashes and crisis prevention
- China’s economic rise and US-China-Europe relations
- Geopolitics, trade and the global rules-based order
- Currency markets and financial stability
- Economic ideas and policy innovation
Ideal for
- Board and audit committee sessions on macro risk, capital allocation and crisis preparedness
- Executive offsites for FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and large privately held firms with material China or emerging-market exposure
- Investor conferences and asset management forums needing a credible economist on global outlook
- CFO, treasury and risk leadership audiences working through currency, rate cycle and political risk decisions
Audience outcomes
- A working read on where the global economy is in the cycle and which signals matter for the next twelve to thirty-six months
- A structured way to think about the early indicators of financial crises, drawn from a published historical framework
- A clearer view of China’s growth trajectory and the commercial consequences of US, EU and UK policy responses
- Confidence to take that view back into a board or investment committee and defend it