John Plender

John Plender is a British writer, broadcaster and journalist based at the Financial Times in London. After Oxford University, he joined Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co in 1967, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1970. He then moved into journalism and became financial editor of The Economist in 1974, where he remained until joining the UK Foreign Office policy planning staff in 1980. On leaving the Foreign Office, he became a senior editorial writer and columnist at the Financial Times.

 A past chairman of Pensions and Investment Research Consultants (Pirc), the UK shareholder activist, and of Quintain PLC, John Plender is currently chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, as well as being a trustee of the £4bn Pearson Group Pension Fund. 

Recent books include Going Off The Rails: Global Capital and the Crisis of Legitimacy, John Wiley (2003) which anticipated the financial crisis and Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets, Biteback Publishing (2015).