Gillian Tett

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.

So you can go back to first principles and treat finance as really an extension of maths or physics.

But if everyone else around you has a different way of looking at the world and you have the madness of crowds getting more and more mad, then just using fundamental analysis won't explain momentum.

And that matters enormously for investing too.

Well, I think one thing we can see very clearly is having math skills is not the only tool you need to be a good investor at all, although that's been very dominant in recent years.

And of course, with the advent of AI, many of the big recruiters are rethinking what they actually want, and they want

Essentially critical thinking as well as facility with numbers and being able to understand the quantitative aspects of markets.