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

But then, of course, as I understand it, the issue that basically started to create the crash was that with all these shenanigans going on, we then had the Bubble Act, lovely name, of 1720, when actually Parliament began to say, This is not okay, we're going to ban joint stock companies.

You began to get a liquidity crisis, and then classically, some of the South E company directors began to start.

out selling, even including John Blunt.

And of course then the crash happens and the shares go from a thousand pounds a share to a hundred and twenty in December.

So they start running for the exits and inevitably this starts to feed on itself and you have a classic crash which sucks in a lot of famous people like Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe.

And of course what that happens next is everyone starts looking for someone to blame.

And John Blunt is in the frame.

So what happens to him?

Jr.

But one of the things I find fascinating is that you know he becomes this villain, if you like, um, who has a lot but not all of his money taken away, but keeps his baronetcy.

Um and yet

The reality is that it's way too easy just to blame John Blunt for everything because there clearly was something else much bigger going on.

And recognising that really matters for how we look at the financial world today, doesn't it?

Or any vision of capitalism.

I mean, do you see these kind of episodes of mania as being intrinsic to capitalism?

Absolutely.

And I mean at this point, enter stage right or stage left, depending on your political persuasion, in comes somebody none other than Sir Robert Walpole.

He became the country's first ever Prime Minister, in fact his longer serving prime minister, and he was a person who ended up riding to the rescue.

Absolutely.

We all love disaster movies, particularly financial disaster movies.

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