She was previously chief market strategist for Britain and Europe for J.P. Morgan Asset Management,[1] and before that was the BBC News economics editor for five years.

She attended St Paul's Girls' School and Balliol College, Oxford, where she obtained a first class degree[3] in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

In 2012, Flanders presented Masters of Money, a BBC Two documentary series exploring the lives of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek.

[10] In August 2012 Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith made a formal complaint to the BBC claiming that there was a pro-Labour bias in her coverage of unemployment figures.

In 2009, Flanders played herself in a BBC Radio production of the Julian Gough short story The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble.

[12] Set in Somaliland in the 1980s, the story is an allegorical analysis of certain aspects of modern economics, such as automatic trading, and complex financial derivatives.

On 26 September 2013 it was announced that Flanders would leave the BBC to join J.P. Morgan Asset Management[1] where she would be chief market strategist for Europe and the UK.

[13] Referring to her departure from the BBC, Guardian columnist Peter Preston wrote: "She wasn't a simple reporter, talking to people and reading the runes: she was an intellectual player in a vital, but often arcane, area.

The US-based journalist Laura Flanders is her sister, the actor Olivia Wilde is a cousin, and the writer and translator Lydia Davis is an aunt.