Finance capitalism is a term in Marxian political economics defined as the subordination of processes of production to the accumulation of money profits in a financial system.^[1] It is characterized by the pursuit of profit from the purchase and sale of, or investment in, currencies and financial products such as bonds, stocks, futures and other derivatives. It also includes the lending of money at interest. Finance capitalism is seen by Marxists as being exploitative by supplying income to non-laborers. ^[2]

Finance capitalism is seen by traditional Marxists as a dialectical outgrowth of industrial capitalism, and part of the process by which the whole capitalist phase of history comes to an end. In the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, it is contrasted with industrial capitalism, where profit is made from the manufacture of goods.

Fascists were vocal in their opposition to finance capitalism.^[3] Academic defenders of the economic concept of capitalism, such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, see profits as part of the roundabout process by which it grows and hedges against inevitable risks.^[4]

See also[link]

• Corporatism
• Economics of fascism
• Financial capitalism
• Financialization

References[link]

Brian Holmes is a Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,^[1] where he teaches an intensive summer seminar. He has worked with the French Graphics collective Ne Pas Plier (Do Not Bend)^[2] from 1999 to 2001. and the French cartography collective Bureau d'Etudes.^[3]

He holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of the book 'Hieroglyphs of the Future'.^[4] He was the English editor of publications for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, 1997. Holmes gives lectures widely in Europe and North & South America, is a frequent contributor to the international mailinglist Nettime, the art magazines Springerin ^[5] (Austria) and Brumaria ^[6](Spain) and the interdisciplinary journal Multitudes (France).

In recent years, Holmes has been co-organizing a series of seminars with the New York City based reading group 16 Beaver Group under the title Continental Drift,^[7] working on the issues of geopolitics and geopoetics. He maintains a blog ^[8] under the same name ('Continental Drift') with the additional subtitle 'the other side of neoliberal globalization'.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Brian Holmes faculty profile at the European Graduate School. (Biography, bibliography, articles, and video lecture)
• Continental Drift Blog by Brian Holmes

Harold Rudolf Foster (August 18, 1892 – July 25, 1982), aka Hal Foster, was a Canadian- American illustrator best known as the creator of the award-winning comic strip Prince Valiant, which influenced numerous artists and was adapted to film.^[1] Foster was 73 when he was elected to membership in Great Britain's Royal Society of Arts, an honor given to very few Americans.

Early life[link]

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Foster was a staff artist for the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg and moved to Chicago in 1919 where he studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and soon found illustration assignments. The illustrator J. C. Leyendecker was an early influence on Foster.^[2]

Foster's Tarzan comic strip, adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, began January 7, 1929, continuing until Rex Maxon took over the Tarzan daily on June 10, 1929. Foster returned to do the Tarzan Sunday strip beginning September 27, 1931, continuing until Burne Hogarth took over the Sunday Tarzan on May 9, 1937.^[3] He soon grew tired of working on an adaptation and began planning his own creation.

[edit] Prince Valiant

William Randolph Hearst, who had long wanted Foster to do a comic strip for his newspapers, was so impressed with Foster's pitch for Prince Valiant that he promised Foster the ownership of the strip if he would start the series, a very rare offer in those days. The strip began February 13, 1937, continuing for decades. In 1954, Foster and his wife Helen were seen on television's This Is Your Life. In the late 1950s, the couple moved from Illinois to Redding Ridge, Connecticut. Later they moved to Winter Park, Florida. In 1967, Woody Gelman revived some of Foster's earlier work for his Nostalgia Press.^[4]

Retirement[link]

In 1970, Foster was suffering from arthritis and began planning his retirement. He had several artists draw Sunday pages before choosing John Cullen Murphy as his collaborator and permanent replacement in 1971. Murphy drew the strip from Foster scripts and pencil sketches. Foster stopped illustrating (and signing) the Prince Valiant pages in 1975. For several years, he continued writing the strip and doing fairly detailed layouts for Murphy, eventually doing less and less of both the writing and art until Alzheimer's took his memory and he no longer remembered ever doing Prince Valiant.

The sole fan convention Foster attended was OrlandoCon, in 1974 and 1975.^[5][6]

Foster died in Winter Park in 1982.

Influence[link]

Foster's impact on comic art was especially significant in the development of adventure strips, due to his controlled compositions, action scenes and detailed drawings of human anatomy and costume. His Prince Valiant pages were much admired by other artists, and he became a key influence on several generations of artists who were creating realistic comic strip and comic book illustrations, including Joe Kubert, George Pratt, Mark Schultz, William Stout, Warren Tufts, the British illustrator Bill Ward, Al Williamson and Wally Wood.

Awards[link]

Foster was recognized for his work by the National Cartoonists Society with the Reuben Award in 1957, the Story Comic Strip Award in 1964, the Special Features Award in 1966 and 1967, all for Prince Valiant. He received the Elzie Segar Award in 1978 and the Gold Key Award (their Hall of Fame) in 1977. Foster was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creators Hall of Fame for his contributions to comic books in 2005. The latter award was accepted on behalf of the family by writer-artist Dave Sim, a longtime admirer of Foster's work.^[7]

Foster was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2006.^[8]

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Blackbeard, Bill. "Artist of the Absurd", Tarzan in Color. Vol. 1. 1931–1932 New York: Flying Buttress Classics Library. ISBN 1‐56163‐049‐7
• Kane, Brian M (2001), Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators, Vanguard Productions, ISBN 1-887591-25-7 . IPPY Award-winning biography.
•          (2009), The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, Fantagraphics Books, ISBN 978-1-60699-305-7 .

External links[link]

• Karlen, David ‘Dave’ (2009‐2), "Buried treasure: Hal Foster’s The Medieval Castle", Original art blog, http://davekarlenoriginalartblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/buried-treasure-hal-fosters-medieval.html .
• Kane, Brian M (2010‐1), "The Making of Hal Foster", Ten cent dreams (interview), http://tencentdreams.blogspot.com/2010/01/hal-foster-interview-comic-book.html .
• Hal Foster at the Grand Comics Database
• "Hal Foster Papers 1937–1973", Digital guides, Syracuse University, http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/f/foster_hr.htm .

v t e Canadian cartoonists English Editorial, spot and gag Living Aislin Michael de Adder Gary Clement Fred Curatolo Andy Donato Brian Gable Nikahang Kowsar Graeme MacKay Terry Mosher Roy Peterson Adrian Raeside Vic Roschkov, Sr. Paul Szep Wyatt Tremblay Deceased Sid Barron John Wilson Bengough Blaine Roy Carless George Feyer William Garnet "Bing" Coughlin Duncan Macpherson Len Norris Charles Thorson Ben Wicks Avrom Yanovsky Strip Living Sandra Bell-Lundy Wally Fawkes J. D. Frazer Paul Gilligan Glen Hanson Lynn Johnston Sean Martin Rina Piccolo Noreen Stevens Philip Street Deceased Walter Ball Hal Foster James Simpkins Jim Unger Doug Wright Comics Living Adrian Alphona Ho Che Anderson Graham Annable Kaare Andrews Chris Bachalo Kate Beaton Marc Bell Stanley Berneche Ian Boothby David Boswell Rupert Bottenberg Chester Brown John Byrne Howard Chackowicz Bernard Chang Svetlana Chmakova David Collier Katherine Collins Darwyn Cooke Dave Cooper Willow Dawson Gene Day Stéphane Delaprée Julie Doucet Max Douglas Dale Eaglesham Alex Fellows Patrick Fillion Tom Fowler Ed Furness Michel Gagné Gerhard Bus Griffiths Ralph Hamelmann Faith Erin Hicks Russ Jones Dave Lapp Julian Lawrence Troy Little Jay Malone Bruce McCall Jason Marcy Derek McCulloch Todd McFarlane Bernie Mireault Arn Saba Seth Dave Sim Leanne Shapton Jay Stephens Jillian Tamaki Ty Templeton Colin Upton Henriette Valium Mason Williams Deceased Jon St. Ables Leo Bachle (Les Barker) Adrian Dingle Owen McCarron Joe Shuster French Editorial, spot and gag Living Bado (Guy Badeaux) Serge Chapleau Deceased Henri Julien Strip Living Delaf Annie Groovie Deceased Raoul Barré Albéric Bourgeois Albert Chartier Comics Living Jimmy Beaulieu Geneviève Castrée Guy Delisle Julie Doucet Michel Rabagliati Steve Requin Yves Rodier

John Perry Barlow
At his home in California, USA, December 2010
Born	(1947-10-03) October 3, 1947 (age 64) Sublette County, Wyoming, United States
Occupation	lyricist, essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1971-1995 (lyrics) 1990-present (essays)
Subjects	Internet (essays)
homes.eff.org/~barlow/

John Perry Barlow (born October 3, 1947) is an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian^[1] political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Since May 1998, he has been a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Biography[link]

Born in Sublette County, Wyoming, Barlow attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. He was a student at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado. There Barlow met Bob Weir, who would later join the music group the Grateful Dead. Weir and Barlow maintained contact throughout the years; a frequent visitor to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow introduced the musical group to Leary in 1967. In 1969, Barlow graduated with high honors in comparative religion from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and spent two years traveling. In 1971, he began practicing animal husbandry in Cora, Wyoming, at his family's Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company. He sold that business in 1988.

Barlow in 2006, European Graduate School, Leuk, Switzerland

The seeds of the Barlow-Weir collaboration were sown at a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, in February 1971. Until this point, Weir had mostly worked with resident Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Hunter preferred that those who sang his songs stuck to his "canonical" lyrics rather than improvising additions or rearranging words. A feud erupted backstage over a couplet in "Sugar Magnolia" from the band's most recent release (most likely "She can dance a Cajun rhythm/Jump like a Willys in four wheel drive"), culminating in a disgruntled Hunter summoning Barlow and telling him "take him (Weir) -- he's yours.^[2]" In the fall of 1971, with a deal for a solo album in hand and only two songs completed, Weir and Barlow began to write together for the first time.

Fueled by massive amounts of Wild Turkey^{[citation needed]} and a traditional Native American creativity spell recommended by band friend Rolling Thunder, the twosome hammered out such enduring songs as "Cassidy," "Mexicali Blues," and "Black Throated Wind," all three of which would remain in the repertoires of the Grateful Dead and Weir's varied solo projects for years to come. Other songs to emerge from the Weir-Barlow collaboration include "Let It Grow," "The Music Never Stopped," "Estimated Prophet," "I Need A Miracle," "Lost Sailor," "Saint of Circumstance," and "Throwing Stones." Barlow also did collaborations with Grateful Dead keyboardists Brent Mydland then later Vince Welnick.

In 1986, Barlow joined The WELL online community, then known for a strong Deadhead presence. He served on the company's board of directors for several years. In 1990, Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) along with fellow digital-rights activists John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor. As a founder of EFF, Barlow helped publicize the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. Barlow's involvement is later documented in the non-fiction book The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) by Bruce Sterling.^[3] EFF later sponsored the ground-breaking case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.

He married Elaine Parker Barlow, with whom he had three daughters: Amelia Rose, Anna Winter, and Leah Justine. Elaine and John were separated in 1992. He was engaged to Dr. Cynthia Horner, whom he met at a convention center. She died in 1994 from a heart arrhythmia, apparently caused by undetected viral cardiomyopathy.^[4]

Barlow was a good friend of John F. Kennedy Jr.^[5]

Politics[link]

Barlow is a former chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party and served as western Wyoming campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney during his 1978 Congressional campaign.^[6] By the early 2000s, Barlow was unable to reconcile his ardent libertarianism with the prevailing neoconservative movement and "didn't feel tempted to vote for Bush"; after an arrest for possession of a small quantity of marijuana while traveling, he joined the Democratic Party and publicly committed himself to outright political activism for the first time since his spell with the Republican Party.^{[citation needed]} Barlow has subsequently declared that he is a Republican.^[7] He has also claimed on many occasions to be an anarchist.^[8] Barlow has said he voted for Natural Law Party Presidential candidate John Hagelin in 2000 after discovering in the voting booth that his friend Nat Goldhaber was Hagelin's running mate.^[9] He said in 2004: "I'm embarrassed for my country that in my entire voting life, there has never been a major-party candidate whom I felt I could vote for. All of my presidential votes, whether for George Wallace, Dick Gregory, or John Hagelin, have been protest votes."^[9] Barlow said that year he was "voting for John Kerry, though with little enthusiasm."^[9]

Current work[link]

Barlow currently serves as vice-chairman of the EFF's board of directors. The EFF was designed to mediate the "inevitable conflicts that have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical world."^[10] They were trying to build a legal wall that would separate and protect the Internet from territorial government, and especially from the U.S. government.^[11]

He is a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, and a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. He spends much of his time on the road, lecturing and consulting about civil rights, freedom of speech, the state of the internet and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He delivered lectures and panel discussions at TWiT Live,^[12] TedxHamburg, Hamburg (Germany),^[13] Greenfest SF,^[14] Civitas (Norwegian think tank),^[15] Internet Society (NY Chapter, New York),^[16] the USC Center on Public Diplomacy,^[17] and the European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee, Switzerland.^[18]

Barlow also serves on the advisory boards of Clear Path International, TTI/Vanguard and the global company Touch Light Media^[19] founded by Anita Ondine.

He is listed as a Managing Partner at Algae Systems^[20] of Nevada, a company dedicated to commercializing a novel method for growing microalgae offshore as a biofuel feedstock. He is listed as a member of the faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS), in Saas-Fee, Wallis, Switzerland.

Barlow sits on the advisory board of the Marijuana Policy Project.^[21]

Writing[link]

From 1971 until 1995, Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, mostly through his relationship with Bob Weir. Among others, Barlow's songs include "Cassidy" (about Neal Cassady and Cassidy Law),^[22] "Estimated Prophet", "Black-Throated Wind", "Hell in a Bucket", "Mexicali Blues", "The Music Never Stopped", and "Throwing Stones".

His writings include "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", which was written in response to the enactment of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 as the EFF saw the law as a threat to the independence and sovereignty of cyberspace. He argued that the cyberspace legal order would reflect the ethical deliberation of the community instead of the coercive power that characterized real-space governance.^[23] Since online "identities have no bodies," they found it inappropriate to obtain order in the cyberspace by physical coercion. ^[24] Instead ethics, enlightened self-interest and the commonwealth were the elements they believed to create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.^[23] Later, articles such as "The Economy of Ideas" were also widely circulated in providing a vision for human creativity online.

Barlow has written extensively for Wired magazine, as well as The New York Times, Nerve, and Communications of the ACM. In his writings, he explained the wonder of the Internet. The Internet to him is more than a computer network. It is a place that he called an "electronic frontier".^[1] "He frequently wrote in language that echoed Henry Stanley's African diary. "Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.""^[25] He has wanted to encourage and provoke youngsters to explore the cyberspace through his writing.

Barlow has also returned to writing lyrics, most recently collaborating with The String Cheese Incident's mandolinist and vocalist Michael Kang, including their song "Desert Dawn." Barlow is often seen at String Cheese Incident concerts mixing with the fans and members in the band.

He has also recently collaborated with the Chicago-based jamband Mr. Blotto on their release Barlow Shanghai. He is an advisor to the Hypothes.is project. ^[26]

Further source[link]

• Goldsmith, Jack, and Tim Wu (February 24, 2006). Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. USA: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515266-2. 

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Perry Barlow

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Perry Barlow

• "Barlow Home(stead)Page". Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/. Retrieved 2010-11-27. 
• "John Perry Barlow Profile (Biography, filmography, photos and video lectures)". European Graduate School. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/john-perry-barlow/biography/. Retrieved 2010-11-27. 
• List of Barlow's lyrical work for the Grateful Dead, in Allan, Alex (ed.). "John Perry Barlow Songs". Grateful Dead Lyric And Song Finder (clearlight.com). http://www3.clearlight.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~acsa/findbarl.pl. Retrieved 2007-11-12. 
• Davis, Aaron (July 28, 2005). "Interview: John Perry Barlow, Wyoming's Estimated Prophet". Planet Jackson Hole. http://www.planetjh.com/news/A_100072.aspx. Retrieved 2007-11-12. 
• This American Life "74:Conventions" Featuring John Perry Barlow in the 3rd Part
• An interview given to Reason magazine
• Publications John Perry Barlow at EFF
• Personal blog copy hosted on Internet Archive.
• Managing Partner at Algae Systems

The Financial Times (FT) is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world.^[2][3]

Along with FT.com, it has an average daily readership of 2.1 million people worldwide (PwC audited figures, November 2011). FT.com has 4 million registered users and 250,000 digital subscribers, as well as 585,681 paying users. FT Chinese has more than 1.7 million registered users.^[4] The Financial Times in print format has an average daily circulation of three hundred and five thousand copies worldwide (the British edition has a daily circulation of eighty eight thousand and a combined Saturday and Sunday, weekend, circulation of one hundred and thirteen thousand copies), as of April 2012.^[5]

Founded in 1888 by James Sheridan and Horatio Bottomley, the Financial Times competed with four other finance-oriented newspapers, in 1945 absorbing the last, the Financial News (founded in 1884). The FT specialises in UK and international business and financial news, and is printed as a broadsheet on light salmon paper.

History[link]

The FT was launched as the London Financial Guide on 9 January 1888, renaming itself the Financial Times on 13 February the same year. Describing itself as the friend of "The Honest Financier and the Respectable Broker", it was a four-page journal. The readership was the financial community of the City of London. The Financial Times established itself as the sober but reliable "stockbroker's Bible" or "parish magazine of the City", its only rival being the slightly older and more daring Financial News. In 1893, the FT turned light salmon pink to distinguish it from the similarly named Financial News.^[6] Also in the 1890s it also collaborated with Walter R Skinner in publishing series of years books and manuals regarding mining investment around the world.From initial rivalry, the two papers were merged by Brendan Bracken in 1945 to form a single six-page newspaper. The Financial Times brought a higher circulation while the Financial News provided editorial talent.

In 1993, the FT printed a single edition on white to commemorate this change a hundred years earlier. The paper has sometimes been informally known as the "Pink Un".^[7]

Over the years, the newspaper grew in size, readership and breadth of coverage. It established correspondents in cities around the world, reflecting early moves in the world economy towards globalisation. Pearson bought the paper in 1957.

As cross-border trade and capital flows increased during the 1970s, the FT began international expansion, facilitated by developments in technology and the growing acceptance of English as the language of business. On 1 January 1979, the first FT was printed outside the UK, in Frankfurt. Since then, with increased international coverage, the FT has become a global newspaper, printed in 22 locations with four international editions to serve the UK, continental Europe, the U.S., Asia and the Middle East.

The European edition is distributed in continental Europe and Africa. It is printed Monday to Saturday at five centres across Europe. Thanks to correspondents reporting from all the centres of Europe, the FT is regarded as the premier news source involving the European Union, the Euro, and European corporate affairs.

On 13 May 1995 the Financial Times group made its first foray into the online world with the launch of FT.com.^[8] This provided a high summary of news from around the globe and was supplemented in February 1996 with the launch of stock prices followed in spring 1996 by the second generation site. The site was funded by advertising and contributed to the online advertising market in the UK in the late 1990s. Between 1997 and 2000 the site underwent several revamps and changes of strategy as the FT Group and Pearson reacted to changes online. FT.com is one of the few UK news sites successfully operating on subscriptions. On 18 March 2009 the Financial Times launched newssift.com,^[9] a semantic search engine that sifts through business news.^[10]

In 1997, the FT launched the U.S. edition, printed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Orlando and Washington, D.C., although the newspaper was first printed outside New York City in 1985. In April 2009, the FT's U.S. circulation was 143,473.^[11] In September 1998, the FT became the first UK-based newspaper to sell more copies internationally than within the UK. Worldwide circulation stands at 421,059^[12] with global readership estimated at over 1.4 million in more than 140 countries.

In 2000, the Financial Times started publishing a German language edition, Financial Times Deutschland, with news and editorial team based in Hamburg. Its initial circulation in 2003 was 90,000. Originally a joint venture with German publishing firm Gruner + Jahr, FT eventually sold its 50% stake to its German partner in January 2008.

The editor of the FT is Lionel Barber, who took over from Andrew Gowers in autumn 2005. In October 2006, the FT launched FT Alphaville, an Internet-based daily news and commentary service for financial professionals.

On 23 April 2007, the FT relaunched, with a new typeface, new labelling, but no reduction in paper size. This redesign has been billed as the “most dramatic revamp [of the FT] in a generation” and includes more panels in the news pages, more first page feature content in the “Companies and Markets” section, and sports content that is more squeezed to allow an extra foreign news page.^[13]

Changes include the reintroduction, above the leaders, of the FT's 1888 motto, “Without fear and without favour”^[14] and more signposts to FT.com. To coincide with the redesign, Pearson PLC announced an advertising campaign centred on the tag-line “We Live in Financial Times”, created by the agency DDB London.^[15][16] The FT redesign was handled by and was the first major project for design firm Shake-up Media and young American designer Ryan Bowman.^[17][18]

In 2009 it was incorporated into the Weekend City Press Review where summaries of the weekend FT papers are published, as well as twelve other leading national papers, on a weekly subscription basis. In January 2012 it was announced that the FT had acquired Assanka, the developer of its mobile offerings.^[19]

Content[link]

The FT is split into two sections. The first section covers domestic and international news, editorial commentary on politics and economics from FT journalists such as Martin Wolf, Gillian Tett and Edward Luce, and opinion pieces from globally renowned leaders, policymakers, academics and commentators. The second section consists of financial data and news about companies and markets.

About 110 of its 475 journalists are outside the UK.

The Lex column[link]

The Lex column is a daily feature on the back page of the first section. It features analyses and opinions covering global economics and finance. The FT calls Lex its agenda-setting column. The column first appeared on Monday, 1 October 1945. The origin of the name may stand for "Lex Mercatoria" a Latin expression meaning literally "merchant law". It was conceived by Hargreaves Parkinson for the Financial News in the 1930s and took it to the Financial Times when the two merged.

Lex boasts some distinguished alumni who have gone on to make careers in business and government – including Nigel Lawson (former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer), Richard Lambert (CBI director and former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee), Martin Taylor (former chief executive of Barclays), John Makinson (chairman and chief executive of Penguin), John Gardiner (former chairman of Tesco), David Freud (former UBS banker and Labour adviser, now a Conservative peer), John Kingman (former head of UKFI and a banker at Rothschild’s), George Graham (RBS banker), Andrew Balls (head of European portfolio management at PIMCO) and Jo Johnson (Conservative Member of Parliament for Orpington).^[20]

FT Weekend[link]

The FT publishes a Saturday edition of the newspaper called the Financial Times Weekend. It consists of international economic and political news, Companies & Markets, Life & Arts, House & Home and FT Magazine.

[edit] How to Spend It

How to Spend It is a monthly magazine published with FT Weekend. Founded and launched by Julia Carrick^[21] with Lucia van der Post as founding editor,^[22] its articles concern luxury goods such as yachts, mansions, apartments, horlogerie, haute couture and automobiles, as well as fashion and columns by individuals in the arts, gardening, food, and hotel and travel industries. To celebrate its 15th anniversary, FT launched the on-line version of this publication howtospendit.com^[23] on 3 October 2009.^[22]

Some media commentators were taken aback by the online launch of a site supporting conspicuous consumption during the financial austerity of the late-2000s recession.^[22] The magazine has been derided in rival publishers' blogs, as "repellent" in the Telegraph^[24] and "a latter-day Ab Fab manual" in the Guardian.^[25]

Editorial stance[link]

The FT advocates free markets and is in favour of globalisation. During the 1980s it supported Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's monetarist policies. It has aligned itself with Labour in the UK. It was also supportive of Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister. FT editorials tend to be pro-European Union. In the 2008 United States presidential election, the Financial Times endorsed Barack Obama.^[26] In the 2010 UK General Election the paper criticised the Conservative Party, but stated that on balance it would support them.^[27]

In 2010, the Wall Street Journal dubbed the FT an "orthodox Keynesian company".^[28] An article in the FT in November 2011 referred to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal as "the conservative bible".^[29]

Political endorsements[link]

Britain[link]

The FT declared its support for Labour as early as the 1992 general election, when Neil Kinnock was attempting for the second time to return Labour to government for the first time since they had been ousted from power in 1979. In one of the surprise election results of the 20th century, John Major's Conservatives were elected for a fourth successive term; though their first under Major himself, as the previous three victories had been under Margaret Thatcher.

In the 2010 general election, the FT was receptive towards Liberal Democrat positions on civil liberties and political reform and praised the then Labour leader, Gordon Brown, for his response to the global financial crisis but on balance, backed the Conservatives, though questioning their Euroscepticism.^[30]

United States[link]

In the 2008 US Presidential election, the FT backed Barack Obama. Although raising concerns over tones of protectionism, the FT praised his ability to 'engage the country’s attention', his calls for a bipartisan politics, as well as his plans for 'comprehensive health-care reform'.^[31]

Ownership and related products[link]

The Financial Times Group is a division of Pearson PLC. It includes the Financial Times, FT.com, FT Search Inc., the publishing imprint FT Press, a 50% shareholding in The Economist, Mergermarket (an online intelligence reporting family) and numerous joint ventures including Vedomosti in Russia. In addition, the FT Group has a unit called FT Business which is a provider of specialist information on retail, personal and institutional finance segments. It is a publisher of The Banker, Money Management and Financial Adviser (a publication targeted at professional advisers), This is Africa, fDi intelligence and Professional Wealth Management (PWM).^[4]

The Financial Times Group announced the beta launch of newssift^[9] FT Search, Inc. in March 2009. Newssift.com is a next generation search tool for business professionals indexing millions of articles from thousands of global business news sources, not just the FT. The Financial Times Group acquired Money Media^[32] (an online news and commentary site for the industry) and Exec-Appointments^[33] (an online recruitment specialist site for the executive jobs market). The FT Group had a 13.85% stake in Business Standard Ltd of India, the publisher of the Business Standard. FT Group has since sold this stake in April 2008 and has entered into an agreement with Network 18 to launch Financial Times in India,^[34][35] though it is speculated that they may find it difficult to do so, as the brand Financial Times in India is owned by The Times Group,^[36] the publisher of The Times of India and The Economic Times. The group also publishes America's Intelligence Wire, a daily general newswire service.^[37]

The Financial Times’ Financial Publishing division provides print and online content for consumer and professional financial audiences. Examples of publications and services include: Investors Chronicle, a personal finance magazine and website; FT Money, a weekly personal finance supplement in FT Weekend; FT Wealth, a magazine for the global high-net-worth community and FTfm, a weekly review of the global fund management industry. Money-Media, a separate arm of Financial Publishing, delivers a range of digital information services for fund management professionals around the globe, including: Ignites, Ignites Europe, Ignites Asia, FundFire and BoardIQ. Intelligence, includes publications and events for the European pensions industry (Pensions Management, Pensions Week and schemeXpert.com). Financial Publishing also provides local language services through Nordic Region Pensions & Investment News (nrpn), Nederlands Pensioen & Beleggingsnieuws (npn), Deutsche Pensions & Investmentnachrichten (dpn), Schweizer Pensions & Investmentnachrichten (spn), The group also publishes MandateWire, a financial information company that provides sales and market intelligence for US and European investment professionals.^[4]

The 'FT' is a business staple.

FT Knowledge is an associated company which offers educational products and services. FT Knowledge has offered the "Introducing the City" course (which is a series of Wednesday night lectures/seminars, as well as weekend events) during the Autumn and Spring since 2000. FT Predict is a prediction market contest the Financial Times is hosting that allows users to buy and sell contracts based on future financial, political, and news-driven events by spending fictional Financial Times Dollars (FT$). Based on the assumptions displayed in James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, this contest allows people to use prediction markets to observe future occurrences while competing for weekly and monthly prizes.

The Financial Times also ran a business related game called "In the Pink" (a phrase meaning "in good health", also a reference to the colour of the newspaper and to the phrase "in the red" meaning to be making a loss). The player is put in the virtual role of Chief Executive and the goal is to have the highest profit when the game closes. The winner of the game (the player who makes the highest profit) will receive a real monetary prize of £10,000. The game ran from 1 May to 28 June 2006.

Since 2005, the FT has sponsored the annual Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Indices[link]

The Financial Times collates and publishes a number of financial market indices, which reflect the changing value of the constituents. The longest running being the former Financial News Index, started on 1 July 1935 by the Financial News. The FT published a similar index, which was replaced by the former which was renamed the Financial Times (FT) Index on 1 January 1947. The index started as an index of industrial shares and companies with dominant overseas interests such as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), British-American Tobacco, Lever Brothers (later Unilever) and Shell were excluded. The oil and financial sectors were included decades later.^[38]

The FTSE All-Share Index, the first one of the FTSE series of indices, was created in 1962, comprising the largest 594 UK companies by market capitalisation.^[38] The letters F-T-S-E represent that FTSE is a joint venture between the Financial Times (F-T) and the London Stock Exchange (S-E). On 13 February 1984 the FTSE 100 was introduced, representing about 80 percent of the London Stock Exchange's value.^[38] In 1995 FTSE Group was made an independent company. The first of several overseas offices was opened in New York City in 1999, Paris in early 2000, and Hong Kong, Frankfurt, and San Francisco in 2001. Madrid was opened 2002, and Tokyo in 2003.

Other well-known FTSE indices include the FTSE 350 Index, the FTSE SmallCap Index, the FTSE AIM UK 50 Index and FTSE AIM 100 Index as well as the FTSE AIM All-Share Index for stocks, and the FTSE UK Gilt Indices for government bonds.

People[link]

• Lionel Barber (Editor)
• Gillian Tett (US Managing Editor)
• Lucy Kellaway (Management Columnist)
• John Authers (Head of Lex)
• Tim Harford (Senior Columnist)
• Gideon Rachman (Chief International Affairs Commentator)
• Martin Wolf (Chief Economics Commentator)
• Jurek Martin (Columnist and former Washington Bureau Chief)

In July 2006, the FT announced a "New Newsroom" project to integrate the newspaper more closely with FT.com. At the same time it announced plans to cut the editorial staff from 525 to 475. In August, it announced that all the required job cuts had been achieved through voluntary layoffs.

A number of former FT journalists have gone on to high-profile jobs in journalism, politics and business. Robert Thomson, previously the paper's US managing editor, was the editor of The Times and is now the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Will Lewis, a former New York correspondent and News Editor for the FT, is the current editor of the Daily Telegraph. Dominic Lawson went on to become editor of the Sunday Telegraph until he was sacked in 2005. Andrew Adonis, a former education correspondent, became an adviser on education to Tony Blair, who was the British prime minister, and was given a job as an education minister and a seat in the House of Lords after the 2005 election. Ed Balls became chief economic adviser to the Treasury, working closely with Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer (or finance minister) before being elected as a Member of Parliament in 2005, and has been Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families since July 2007. Bernard Gray, a former defence correspondent and Lex columnist, was chief executive of publishing company CMP before becoming chief executive of TSL Education, publisher of the Times Educational Supplement. David Jones, at one time the FT Night Editor, then became Head of IT. He was a key figure in the newspaper's transformation from hot metal to electronic composition and then onto full-page pagination in the 1990s. He went onto become Head of Technology for the Trinity Mirror Group.

Sir Geoffrey Owen was Editor, Financial Times, 1981–1990. Thereafter he joined the London School of Economics – Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) as Director of Business Policy in 1991 and was appointed Senior Fellow, Institute of Management, in 1997. He continues his work there. During his tenure at the FT he had to deal with rapid technological change and issues related to it, for example, repetitive strain injury (RSI) issue which affected dozens of FT journalists, reporters and staff in the late 1980s.

Editors[link]

See also[link]

	London portal
	Journalism portal

• List of newspapers in the United Kingdom
• Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award
• Periodical publication
• Business Journalism

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website