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

it's a bit like a payday borrower kind of thing.

you know, any debt I could find at really high rates.

And of course there was another thing going on at the time as well, wasn't there?

In that the growth of the coffee houses in London that was creating an ecosystem of wannabe traders sharing informational rumours, you had the Bank of England emerging as well.

And so

It was a very febrile time from what I understand, and if we start at seventeen ten, which was a crucial year, that was when you also had a big change of government, don't you?

Tell us about that, because the Tories had come in after sixteen years of rule by their arch enemies, the Whigs, and they're the ones at the centre of the South Sea Company story.

At what modern day Trumpians would call the swamp.

You had the swamp in charge.

So at this point though, there were essentially two key characters who jump in.

So one is Sir Robert Harley, who was a Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, um, formerly the Lord High Treasurer to Queen Anne, and he's the one who decides to set up a Tory controlled company.

But the other crucial person is John Blunt, our antihero, who's a really curious character.

I mean, he's one of the most influential people in the financial history of the time.

and what he actually does next is going to impact the world for a very long time.

But he's also very, very mysterious.

I mean, there aren't any biographies about him really.

I mean he hasn't even got his own Wikipedia page.

Which is just a good thing.

I know, I know.

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