Gillian Tett

speaker

1,226 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 2 Sep

Gillian Tett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The Story of Money · South Sea Bubble: the shoemaker’s son who sparked Britain’s first financial crisis · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

And like any good disaster movie, there is a person in particular in the frame who's called John Blunt.

And he was the architect of the South Sea Company.

He was a shoemaker's son who'd risen up the social ranks to become the head of the most powerful company in the country.

And the crisis he helped to engineer would take three hundred years for Britain to pay it off.

So today we're telling the story of the Celsius bubble.

Um, one of the most famous events in financial history.

The world's first international stock market crash.

Robin loves talking about debt, but we're gonna be talking about a very important wrinkle today.

So welcome to the story of money with me, Gillian Tett.

To get into the South Sea Bubble, we're joined by a special guest who's an expert at this, Thomas Levison, author of many books, including Money for Nothing, The South Sea Bubble, which of course is relevant today.

Tom is a professor of science writing at MIT.

So great to have you with us, Tom.

Sounds a lot like the Silicon Valley boot bubble today, doesn't it?

So Tom, this isn't really a story about the South Sea, is it?

It's actually about British government debt.

Explain to us what was happening with British government debt, because it was rising fast back then, wasn't it?

And of course the interest rates were pretty high back then, weren't they?

And it was all a bit fragmented and messy from what I understand.

known by the technical term.

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