Izabella Kaminska joined FT Alphaville in October 2008, which was of course the best time in the world to become a financial blogger. Before that she worked as a producer at CNBC, a natural gas reporter at Platts and an associate editor of BP’s internal magazine. She has also worked as a reporter on English language business papers in Poland and Azerbaijan and was a Reuters graduate trainee in 2004.
For one week in 2003, and one week only, she traveled on her own initiative to Kabul to report on Afghanistan’s emerging business and banking industry. She stayed with mercenaries, which was cool. She later sold the piece to a business magazine, which was also cool.
The experience, however, taught her the valuable lesson of risk/return trade-offs.
Today she prefers to report from the mean streets of Geneva, Switzerland — a notorious European risk-aversion zone.
Everything she knows about economics stems from a childhood fascination with ancient economies, specifically the agrarian land reforms of the early Roman republic and the coinage and price stability reforms of late Roman emperors. Her favourite emperor is one Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletian.
She studied Ancient History at UCL, and has a masters in Journalism from what was then the London College of Printing.
And yes, she is also a second-generation West London Pole (who likes mushroom picking, bigos and pierogi).
