Virtual panel: Business beyond covid-19: Resilience and recovery

John Ferguson is head of Economist Impact’s globalisation, trade and finance practice. He is responsible for leading and developing the practice across different geographic areas and sectors, including both public and private organisations. As the global economy is transformed by multiple forces including geopolitics, technological progress and climate change, the practice works with clients to navigate these structural shifts and lead the global conversation. Mr Ferguson has 16 years’ experience in policy and economic analysis, most recently as director of macroeconomics, guiding the EIU’s global economic analysis across 200 countries. Prior to this, he was director of country analysis and global forecasting.

William Hobbs joined Barclays in October 2005, and is the chief investment officer for wealth management and investment, Barclays UK (BUK). Mr Hobbs leads the team focussed on the core aspects of the investment offering, setting the BUK strategic asset allocation, tactical asset allocation, investment philosophy and delivering investment content. The CIO team is the home of investment decisions which form and deliver our best thinking portfolios.

Prior to his current role, Mr Hobbs held the position of head of investment strategy for Barclays UK, after starting with Barclays in the equity research team, covering the global consumer sector and then running global equity strategy for the EMEA division.

He is a fellow of the Securities Institute and has close to 20 years of experience in the financial sector. He has a masters in international business and economic development at Birkbeck, University of London and is a Chartered Alternative Investments Analyst. Mr Hobbs is a frequent contributor of economic and capital market’s insight to Bloomberg, CNBC and various other media outlets.

Bob is Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Bob joined the School in November 2008 from Risk Management Solutions, the world’s leading provider of computer models for quantifying the risk of catastrophic events, where he was Director of Public Policy. He worked at the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science, for eight years until October 2006, where his responsibilities included science policy communications. He has also worked as a freelance
science writer and as a science reporter for ‘The Daily Telegraph’. He has a first degree in geology and an unfinished PhD thesis on palaeopiezometry. Bob is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Geological Society. He is also Deputy Chair of the London Climate Change Partnership, and a member of the executive committee of the Association of British Science Writers.

Nina Seega is a Research Director for Sustainable Finance at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). She is an expert in the use of risk management tools to address environmental sources of risk in the financial sector. Since 2016 she has co-led the CISL team serving as Knowledge Partner for the risk analysis track of the G20 Green Finance Study Group. Previously, Nina was the Head of the London Traded Products Desk for Dresdner Kleinwort, where she was responsible for credit risk management of traded products.

Alastair Hamilton is an Associate Partner in McKinsey’s London office and serves companies and governments on a range of strategy, capital productivity, and organisational topics. He leads McKinsey's work on net zero in the UK and negative emissions.

Alastair recently co-authored the article “How a post-pandemic stimulus can both create jobs and help the climate and has led our global work on green stimulus around the world."