Gillian Tett

speaker

242 appearances 5 recordings 3 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 20 Jul

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 — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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FT News Briefing · Introducing The Story of Money: They are history’s geniuses. But were they any good at investing? · 2 May 2026 podcast

Is that right?

What I find fascinating, though, is that he went from being basically a day trader to being a very long term, patient investor in just a few stocks, which he analyzed bottom up, if you like.

And, you know, I am now overseeing a committee that looks at the endowment of King's College a century later.

It's quite hard for any big institution today to actually copy that style because the pressure from almost everybody advising you is to go into exchange rated funds and try and mimic the market.

And that's quite a shift, isn't it, Toby?

In some senses, we should say a big thank you to John Miller Keynes here at King's College, because at least he did create an endowment.

I just wish that we'd managed to keep it going in the subsequent years.

But there we go.

Well, I think that today what's different is that, of course, if I was to suddenly go mad and start day trading, you'd know that on social media it would be instantly reported and there'd be an outcry and a lot of transparency.

Keynes, in his lifetime, was lucky enough that almost nobody was scrutinizing what he was actually doing.

So he could lose all that money in the 1920s, learn the right lesson, and then pick himself up and try again.

Property tends to pay off in the long term, doesn't it?

But what about some other people?

I'm particularly curious about Jane Austen because she used to write a lot about economics in the sense of domestic management.

Of course, the word economics comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning household stewardship.

So she wrote a lot about home economics.

Was she any good at economics herself?

Well, it seems to me the issue is whether someone has two skills, not just one skill when you're investing.

Because on the one hand, if you're a brilliant mind, you might be able to spot amazing arbitrage opportunities.

You can sit and do the maths around fundamental value assets and see whether they're worth what is quoted in the markets or not.

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