Profile: Maria Bartiromo

Profile of CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo, arguably the most recognised financial correspondent in the world.

By all accounts, George W Bush put in a vintage performance at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner. But as guests applauded the President's description of an encounter with Dick Cheney ("Don't shoot! I begged him."), a different plot was unravelling at the CNBC table where Ben Bernanke was deep in conversation with the channel's anchor, "Money Honey" Maria Bartiromo. Doubtless the new Fed chief got a sympathetic hearing when he confided his disquiet that the markets had mistaken his "more flexible approach" to interest rates for "softness", says Gerard Baker in The Times. But he had fallen into "a Honey Trap". Bartiromo went straight to her viewers with his supposedly off-the-record remarks and the Dow dropped 70 points in minutes. It was the first tremor of the quake that would send markets into free-fall a fortnight later.

This episode has only enhanced Bartiromo's reputation as a woman who can rock markets. Variously described as "the Sophia Loren of financial journalism" and "the face that launched a thousand blips", she is arguably the most recognised business hack in the world. In the mid-1990s, she became the first journalist to report live from the stock exchange floor, delivering thrice-daily stock reports. Indeed, traders have long since examined every nuance of Bartiromo's appearance for clues on market direction. Entire websites were devoted to changes in her hairstyle.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.