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 · When Nixon put America first and took the dollar off gold · 10 Jun 2026 podcast

This all sounds so unbelievably familiar in the sense of having a very dominant president who wants to be disruptive and dramatic. matched

who wants to look as if he's being decisive as well, who loves to blame other people, even creating, you know, straw men to attack in order to do that, and is determined to make this stunning announcement matched

um to the nation and to essentially show that he's in charge. matched

Right. matched

I mean this all again sounds very familiar. matched

Um I mean what Nixon actually does is he sends John Connolly, his Treasury Secretary, out to try and persuade the same trade partners who are feeling so bruised to renegotiate their exchange rates with the dollar. matched

How did Connolly handle things and how did that go down? matched

But did Connolly manage to break that deadlock at all? matched

So essentially the US blinked a bit. matched

yes. matched

And so they ended up with some kind of big summit, um, in the Azores, didn't they, with the French President Pompidou? matched

how did Bretton Woods actually finally die? matched

you wrote the literal book on this episode and you actually lived and worked through it all as a junior official in the administration then. matched

Um, when you look back at that period today, what do you see as the major lessons for our modern world from the Nixon shock and the challenge to Bretton Woods? matched

I mean, do you see parallels with our modern era? matched

Absolutely. matched

I mean, I knew Paul Volker well and just before he died, I remember him telling me with a sense of absolute heartbreak that we needed more public servants with a very strong sense of public interest. matched

And the current system educationally and societally just simply wasn't matched

producing the kind of reverence for public service, or even one might say, the awareness of the international matched

role of the US and respecting that. matched

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