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Speakers in the news 1st December

Raleigh Addington
Raleigh Addington
editor at Chartwell Speakers

Chartwell Speakers have been featuring in the news this week. See our ‘Top Five’ picks below. If you are interested in booking any of these speakers please contact us here.

 

1) EMMA BRIDGEWATER

  • Two decades ago, designer Emma Bridgewater tapped into English pottery traditions and made them her own. Now a celebrated taste-maker in the UK, her Stoke-on-Trent factory can barely keep up with demand. The company has a £17 million annual turnover and has reached double-digit growth year on year.
  • With the news of the royal engagement taking over the media this week, Emma was one of the first off the mark the occasion with merchandise, developing a mug within a few hours of the official announcement. Known for its pretty, country – style designs, the company’s classic ceramic mug displays the painted words ‘Harry & Meghan are engaged’ on one side and ’27th November 2017′ on the other. The words are surrounded by a filigree and heart design in red and blue. 

2) JOSEPH STIGLITZ 

  • Joseph Stiglitz is widely regarded as one of the world’s finest economic thinkers. He has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory, development economics and trade theory, public and corporate finance, the theories of industrial organisation and rural organisation, and the theories of welfare economics and income and wealth distribution.
  • The former chief economist of the World Bank wants bitcoin banned. “Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight,” Joseph Stigliz, currently a professor at Columbia University, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television today, as the cryptocurrency reached new all-time highs this week. However, Stiglitz, who also chaired the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration, said he does support technological innovation in payments, but thinks digital money should still be fiat created and controlled by the government. “Let’s move away from paper into the 21st century of a digital economy,” he said.

3) ADAIR TURNER

  • Lord Adair Turner is a world-renowned expert on global economic trends, global finance, macro prudential regulation and the Chinese financial system. Since 2013 he has served as Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), a new think tank founded by George Soros dedicated to re-thinking the field of economics in the wake of the financial crisis. Since 2015 he has served as Chair of the Governing Board.

  • Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, Adair said prices of green electricity and batteries have fallen so sharply that even projections for an 85-90% renewables energy system in 2035 now look “ludicrously conservative” and even the most optimistic projections about renewables made in the past, including those done by Greenpeace, had been beaten by the actual costs of deployment on the ground.

4) RORY CELLAN-JONES

  • Rory Cellan-Jones has been a reporter for the BBC for a quarter of a century, covering business and technology stories for much of that time.

  • As the value of one Bitcoin nears the symbolic $10,000 mark, warnings are growing that its bubble is about to burst.The cryptocurrency hit an all-time high on Monday after its price soared to more than 15% over the weekend. The $10,000 landmark is “seen as a critical test of whether Bitcoin’s time has truly come or whether – as many critics argue – it is a house of cards, ready to collapse as soon as it comes under pressure”, says the The Daily Telegraph. Rory commented this week, “This has felt like the latest, maddest speculative bubble, a tulip fever for the hi-tech era”. While Bitcoin has seemed in trouble plenty of times before – splits in the community over how it should be governed, robberies at exchanges, warnings from regulators – “every time that pundits have warned the bubble is about to burst, the currency has stuttered for a few days and then gone charging higher”. 

5) PETER BAZALGETTE 

  • Sir Peter Bazalgette is Chairman of ITV and Chair of Arts Council England. He is a creator and producer of worldwide television formats and a respected thinker on the nexus between creativity, business and society. His speaking subjects include – the future of television, the social impact of the digital era and the life and legacy of the visionary Victorian sewer engineer, Sir Joseph Bazalgette. He also speaks about the benefits of arts and culture in his role at Arts Council England.
  • Peter wrote an article for The Guardian arguing that in the era of Netflix and Amazon, the original Reithian vision of ‘inform, educate and entertain’ is more important to the national culture than ever. He wrote, ”Public service broadcasting is more important today than ever. It generates the trusted news that informs our democracy in an era of widespread fakery, the original programmes that help define our national culture, and the economic growth and international influence that flow from our creative excellence.”
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