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.

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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

Which once again seemed to make sense of the time.

Until

It all went horribly wrong.

So that's where we're going to go to in the second half of this podcast.

So come back after a quick break.

Exactly, because for the last nine years the company's share price has been kind of boring.

It's been bobbing around at about a hundred pounds to one hundred and thirty pounds per share.

But then over the next twelve months it starts behaving like a meme stock.

It goes up to a thousand pounds a share before then collapsing right back to where it started.

And that of course means that not only did loads of investors get involved, but lots of them ended up facing financial ruin.

But Tom, before we talk about exactly how the bubble unfolded and burst, can you tell us why it happened now?

Because the Celsius company was originally set up in seventeen eleven to carry out a nine million pounds debt for equity swap.

So what's different about the new debt swap that happened when the government tried to consolidate the debts and why did it create such a calamity?

So question I have then is why didn't the existing investors look at this and cut and run?

If they were gonna be diluted out, why not panic and get out?

And of course John Blunt himself is enjoying this alchemy too, because I mean he had what, three hundred thousand pounds worth of company stock on paper and the modern day equivalent of that is a hundred and sixty five million pounds.

I mean, that's extraordinary alchemy, isn't it?

Of course you had even some brilliant minds like Isaac Newton getting sucked in.

I mean we talked to him about him on an earlier episode, and he got sucked into the mania as well.

So with everyone going gangbusters for this, I mean, was there the sense that there was this mass hysteria that was beyond anyone's control?

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