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.

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. 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.

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.

James Beeland Rogers, Jr. (born October 19, 1942) is an American investor and author. He is currently based in Singapore. Rogers is the Chairman of Rogers Holdings and Beeland Interests, Inc. He was the co-founder of the Quantum Fund with George Soros and creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI).

Rogers is an outspoken proponent of the free market, but he does not consider himself a member of any school of thought. Rogers acknowledged, however, that his views best fit the label of Austrian School of economics.

Rogers was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Demopolis, Alabama. He started in business at the age of five by selling peanuts and by picking up empty bottles that fans left behind at baseball games. He got his first job on Wall Street, at Dominick & Dominick, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in History from Yale University in 1964. Rogers then acquired a second BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University in 1966.

Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American politician who has been the U.S. Representative for Texas's 14th congressional district, which includes Galveston, since 1997, and a three-time candidate for President of the United States, as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and currently 2012. He is an outspoken critic of American foreign and monetary policies, including the Military–industrial complex and the Federal Reserve, and is known for his libertarian-leaning views, often differing from his own party on certain issues.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Paul is a graduate of Gettysburg College and Duke University School of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree. He served as a medical officer in the United States Air Force from 1963 until 1968. He worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist from the 1960s to the 1980s, delivering more than 4,000 babies. He became the first Representative in history to serve concurrently with a child in the Senate when his son Rand Paul was elected to the United States Senate for Kentucky in 2010.

Martin Wolf, CBE (born 1946) is a British journalist, widely considered to be one of the world's most influential writers on economics. He is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times.

Wolf was born in London, 1946. His father Edmund was an Austrian Jewish playwright who escaped from Vienna to England before World War II. In London, Edmund met Wolf's mother, a Dutch Jew who had lost nearly thirty close relatives in the Holocaust. Wolf recalls that his background left him wary of political extremes and encouraged his interest in economics, as he felt economic policy mistakes were one of the root causes of WWII. Wolf was educated at University College School and in 1967 entered Corpus Christi College at Oxford University for his undergraduate studies. He initially studied Classics before starting the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Course As a graduate student Wolf moved on to Nuffield College, also at Oxford, which he left with a master of philosophy degree in economics in 1971. Wolf has said that he never pursued a PhD because he "didn't want to become an academic". Wolf was an active supporter of the Labour Party (UK) until the early 1970s.

Lionel Barber is an English journalist.

Barber was appointed Editor of the Financial Times (FT) in November 2005. Previously, he was the Financial Times' U.S. Managing Editor and before that, Editor of the FT's Continental European edition (2000–2002), during which he briefed US President George W. Bush ahead of his first trip to Europe. Other positions at the FT include News Editor (1998–2000), Brussels Bureau Chief (1992–1998), and both Washington Correspondent and US Editor (1986–1992).

Barber was educated at Dulwich College, an independent school for boys in Dulwich in South London and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a joint honours degree in German and Modern History.

Barber began his career in journalism in 1978 as a reporter for The Scotsman. In 1981, after being named Young Journalist of the Year in the British press awards, he moved to the Sunday Times, where he was a business correspondent. He has co-written several books, including a history of Reuters news agency (The Price of Truth, 1985) and the Westland political scandal (Not with Honour, 1986). In 1985, he was the Laurence Stern fellow at the Washington Post. In 1992, he was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, working under Nelson Polsby at the Institute of Governmental Studies. In 1996, he was a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman centre at the European University Institute in Florence.