Martin Wolf

Martin Wolf
Martin Wolf in 2011
Born	1946 London
Occupation	Journalist
Citizenship	British
Education	University College School, Hampstead, London
Alma mater	Corpus Christi College, Oxford Nuffield College, Oxford
Subject	Economics
Spouse	Alison Wolf

Martin Wolf, CBE (born 1946) is a British journalist who focuses on economics. He is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times.

Wolf was born in London, in 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. He was an active supporter of the Labour Party until the early 1970s.

Wolf was educated at University College School, a day independent school for boys in Hampstead in north west London, 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".

In 1971, Wolf joined the World Bank's young professionals programme, becoming a senior economist in 1974. By the start of the eighties, Wolf was deeply disillusioned with the Bank's policies undertaken under the direction of Robert McNamara: the Bank had been strongly pushing for increased capital flows to developing countries, which had resulted in many of them suffering debt crises by the early 1980s. Seeing the results of misjudged intervention by global authorities and also influenced from the early 1970s by various works critical of government intervention, such as Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Wolf shifted his views towards the right and the free market.