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 · last 12 months

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

Appearances

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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

Does he even

Does he

Get on John Blunt and Robin Wigglesworth.

They both deserve their own Wikipedia.

Let's

So just to jump in there, it's a bit like saying to people who might own treasury bonds today, you know, we'll take your treasuries and we're gonna swap them for a bunch of, say, Elon Musk's latest speculative dream vision company or whatever.

Is that roughly what's going on here?

Because it's a pretty novel concept taking government debt and swapping it for a pie in the sky new venture instead.

So for the creditors, people holding British government debt, the idea of suddenly having liquidity in a way to cash out, or what people today in Silicon Valley like to call a liquidity event, was pretty attractive.

And then for the British government, I would imagine they probably not only managed to consolidate the debts, but get a much lower rate of interest, didn't they?

was a bit like Elon Musk trying to persuade everyone to back you know a mission to Mars.

You know, it's like, yes, we'll get there in the end, don't worry about it.

I mean it sounds ludicrous.

Absolutely.

And of course one of the other bits to this story, which has got glossed over in history so much is

is that the economic opportunity everyone was excited getting excited about, to put that in quotation marks, was actually about human beings in slavery.

And, you know, again, Cambridge, like Oxford, like almost every b British institution right now, is having to recognize that its antecedents had a role in the slave trade.

Whether that was, you know, Isaac Newton or Alexander Pope, David Daniel Defoe, there was almost nobody at the time who was entirely disconnected from the slave trade.

And that just is a grubby truth about this period in history, isn't it?

And I seem to recall that the doing something meant they went out and consolidated the debts, um, which were now more than thirty million pounds, into the South Sea Company.

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