Olaf Storbeck, born 1974 in Gelsenkirchen, is the International Economics Correspondent with Handelsblatt, Germany’s business and financial daily. Based in London, he is writing about current economic research. According to St. Gallen Symposium he is “a leading expert on current academic research in economics and management”.
Olaf also has a page on Facebook – and appreciates if you like him.
Olaf is constantly after new academic papers which are either relevant or just utterly interesting, be it on macroprudential regulation, happiness or the beauty of CEOs.
From 1995 to 2000 Olaf studied Economics at the University of Cologne and Journalism at the Cologne School of Journalism. He joined Handelsblatt in 2001, where he started as a reporter for e-business. After the internet bubble burst he wrote about the business cycle and the labour market. In 2005 he devised a new section on current economic research for Handelsblatt, which currently is being published twice a week. A weekly email newsletter (in German) summarizing the coverage has almost 16,000 subscribers. Olaf also is responsible for the highly influential ranking of German-speaking economists, which is being published in Handelsblatt since 2006. Since October 2009 Olaf is living and working in London.
To date, Olaf has written two books on current economic research. In 2007 the German edition of “Economics 2.0 – What the best minds in Economics can teach you about Business and Life” (jointly with Norbert Häring) was considered the best German business book of the year by getAbstract. (A free chapter of the English edition is available here.)
In September 2009 Olaf published “Die Jahrhundertkrise – Über Finanzalchemiste, das Versagen der Notenbanken und John Maynard Keynes” , a book explaining the causes and consequences of the financial crisis (“The Centennial Crisis – On Financial Alchemy, the Failure of the Central Banks and John Maynard Keynes”). It has been very positively reviewed (i.e. by Klemens Kindermann, economics editor with Deutschlandfunk, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung [not available online] and Dirk Elsner with Blicklog). Read a free chapter (in German) here.
(Q&A on “Die Jahrhundertkrise”, in German)
He frequently gives speeches in English and German on a diverse range of topics, for example the logic of globalisation, the causes and consequences of the financial crisis and the failure of current macroeconomics.
Olaf lives in Highbury, north London and is married.
Since he is crazy about cycling he has recently started a blog dedicated to cycling issues called “Cycling Intelligence”. Please check it out!
Contact Olaf by email: o [dot] storbeck [at] googlemail [dot] com
Follow Olaf on Twitter: twitter.com/olafstorbeck for tweets in English , twitter.com/olaf_storbeck for tweets in German.
