Wall Street Editor, The Economist; Multiple Award-Winning Journalist; Author of The Land Trap
Mike Bird brings a sharp, global perspective to today’s most pressing financial and economic issues. As The Economist’s Wall Street editor and co-host of its Money Talks podcast, he offers audiences rare insight into the forces shaping global markets and economic power. With his book The Land Trap, Bird also explores how land and ownership continue to drive politics, inequality, and growth—making him an ideal speaker for audiences seeking depth, clarity, and relevance in a changing world.
How Chinese Real Estate Became the Biggest Bubble in History
Mike Bird: China's Most Important Asset on Works in Progress
Money Talks Podcast: Can Vietnam be the new Singapore?
Land is the largest single source of wealth in the world, and the source of most of the value of real estate in the world’s most expensive city, but its role in the economy and the financial system is often hidden from view. This talk explores Mike Bird’s debut book, The Land Trap, and explains why so many of the defining phenomena of the modern world—from inequality, to financial fragility and the growth and success of entire nations—is rooted in land and its use as an asset. Bird explains why investors, businesses and institutions need to understand how land works, and why it matters.
From artificial intelligence to trade wars, the surging price of gold and digital assets, to the boom in non-bank finance, the financial world has been transformed in the decade and a half since the global financial crisis. In this talk, Mike Bird explains the enormous shifts in the way financial markets function in an increasingly fragmented and uncertain world. Bird provides a candid outlook for the future for the dollar as a reserve asset, America’s role as the centre of innovation and dynamism, and what the growing mountain of public debt across the rich world means for businesses and investors everywhere.
As tensions between Beijing and Washington, D.C. grow with each passing year, the role of the rest of Asia in the contest between the two superpowers becomes increasingly crucial. Questions about supply chain security, trade tensions, advanced manufacturing and foreign investment in Asia are all at the forefront of the contest. As the Economist’s former Asia business and finance editor, Mike Bird explores the pivotal role that allies and trading partners across the world’s most populous continent will play in determining the shape of the 21st century, and what America can do to retain its leadership in the region.
Mike Bird is The Economist’s Wall Street editor, leading the publication’s coverage of topics across the American financial industry, and the biggest trends in global finance. He is one of the regular writers of the Buttonwood column on financial markets, and the co-host of Money Talks, The Economist’s podcast on markets, business and economics. He is based in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Leeds, England.
He is the author of The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset, published by Portfolio, a Penguin Random House, in November 2025. The book covers the crucial and often explosive role of land in politics, economics and history over the past three hundred years and in various corners of the world.
Mike joined The Economist as Asia business and finance editor in 2021, and spent seven years working in Asia, during which time he was based in Singapore and Hong Kong, where he wrote about capital markets, economic development and major corporations across the region. Previously, Mike worked for the Wall Street Journal as a financial columnist.
In 2016 Mike won the Wincott Award for young financial journalist of the year, and in 2020, he won a Human Rights Press Award from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, the Hong Kong Journalists Association and Amnesty International Hong Kong with colleagues for their coverage of Hong Kong’s democracy movement.
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Financial Horizons
