Liam Halligan

Liam James Halligan (born 29 April 1969) is a British economist, journalist, author and broadcaster. He is currently economics and business editor at GB News.

Since 2003, Halligan has written a weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph. He also presents The Telegraph' s weekly Planet Normal podcast.

Halligan was born to an Irish family and grew up in Kingsbury, London. Halligan attended the John Lyon School on a scholarship, where he became head boy.

The first person in his family to attend university, he graduated with a first-class degree in economics from the University of Warwick and went on to gain an MPhil in economics from St Antony's College, Oxford.

In 1992, following graduation, Halligan joined his former university tutor Robert Skidelsky at The Social Market Foundation, the Westminster-based think tank. He later worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute and in the Fiscal Affairs Department at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, USA, as a research economist.

In 1994, Halligan joined the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and moved to Moscow. In Moscow he shared a flat with Dominic Cummings.[10]

Together with other economists from LSE, Oxford and Harvard, he co-founded Russian Economic Trends, an academic journal that published macroeconomic data, analysis and commentary on Russia.[11] He also helped to establish the Russian-European Centre for Economic Policy, an inter-governmental policy advisory group.[12]

Since 1997, Halligan has sat on the Policy Advisory Board of The Social Market Foundation.[13] In 2010, he became a founder member of the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE), an ESRC-funded research centre at the University of Warwick.[14]

In 2017, Halligan was invited to join an expert advisory committee at the Department for International Trade.[15] He has also testified before a number of Parliamentary committees. In April 2020, he called for the Government to build more social housing.[16] In February 2021, he appeared before the Lords Economic Affairs Select Committee on quantitative easing.[17]

In 2019, he published Home Truths, which argues that the UK's housing shortage deprives vulnerable families of decent social housing.[18]

In 2020, he was shortlisted by the Government for the post of Downing Street TV Press Secretary.[19]

In the early 1990s, Halligan wrote a weekly column for The Moscow Times and covered Russian economics and politics for The Economist and The Economist Intelligence Unit.[20] He also wrote about the Soviet Union for The Wall Street Journal and Euromoney.[21]

In 1996, Halligan was appointed political correspondent at the Financial Times. He covered the 1997 general election and Good Friday Agreement as part of a team led by political editor Robert Peston.[22] He went on to become economics correspondent at Channel 4 News, where he remained until 2006.

From 1999 to 2002, while at Channel 4 News, Halligan wrote a weekly economics column for Sunday Business before moving his column to The Sunday Telegraph.[23] In 2006, he was appointed economics editor at The Sunday Telegraph.[24] From 2008 to 2010, he wrote a monthly column for GQ.[25]

Halligan was a founding panellist on the daily television discussion show CNN Talk. He was a regular panellist on This Week, presented by Andrew Neil.[26] When the BBC axed the programme in 2019, Halligan said the corporation had made a "blindingly obvious mistake".[27]

Since 2004, he has also regularly presented standalone documentaries on Channel 4, including for Dispatches, and sits on the jury of the Royal Television Society's Specialist Journalist award.[28]

In March 2021, Halligan was named as economics and business editor at GB News and co-presenter of a daily lunchtime show with former Labour Party MP Gloria De Piero.[29]

From September 2021 to September 2022, Halligan presented his own show on GB News, On The Money, which ran for an hour every weekday and focused on financial topics. On 1 September 2022, it was announced that the show was to be axed, with Halligan having an increased presence on other GB News programmes, centering around the Cost of living crisis.

Halligan has also written for New Statesman, Prospect, and UnHerd.[30][31] He also writes for The Spectator and The Sun. He has presented shows on LBC and BBC Radio Five Live.[32][33]

Between 2008 and 2013, Halligan was Chief Economist at Prosperity Capital Management, an institutional asset management focussed on the Soviet Union.[11]

Since 2014, Halligan has been a shareholder at Bne IntelliNews, where he is also Editor-at-Large.[34]

He lives with journalist and author Lucy Ward, and they have two daughters and one son together.[35]

Halligan is a citizen of both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. In 2012, he was invited to join the Global Irish Network, an advisory board of Irish nationals living outside Ireland.[36] He is also a regular panellist at the Kilkenomics Festival.[37]

In 2016, he was appointed a Governor at John Lyon School.[38] His hobbies include guitar, double bass, traditional Irish music, choral music, film, rowing, and sailing.