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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
That doesn't just hit, obviously, the energy exports, but the fertilizer and other petrochemical exports as well.
And who's going to be hit by a loss of fertilizer?
Well, yes, it will be to some degree places like America, but places like Pakistan or Bangladesh or many parts of Southeast Asia that are going to be squeezed.
And the cruelty is that these, of course, are the countries least well-equipped to actually weather it.
And what you see right now is a very interesting split between countries like China, which have been stockpiling huge amounts of spare resources and reserves of everything from fossil fuels through to fertilizer and rare earth minerals and beyond, and a place like Pakistan that has not been able to do that at all in the past few years.
One lesson is going to be, of course, that everyone now is going to go into hoarding mode.
and be trying to stockpile everything in a way that we saw last year in COVID.
We definitely saw it with tariffs.
That was more in the case of individual companies, though, trying to engage in hoarding.
What you're likely to see going forward is a debate in many countries, including Europe as well, about what kind of national strategic reserves they need to protect themselves.
And it's the same national version of what households were doing during COVID with toilet rolls.
You know, you start to panic, you go and buy up everything you can find.
Suddenly the shelves are empty, the prices go up, and that engenders more panic.
So hoarding is never a particularly good thing for economic growth, but it seems pretty much inevitable now.
Well, in terms of China, it's emerging as one of the winners of the current fight in the Middle East because it's been sitting there very quietly looking at America essentially suffer what's in many ways a strategic defeat in the Middle East, expend a lot of its military without much to actually show for it at the moment and suffer real damage.
And of course, Europe is suffering on the back of the energy squeeze.
And China is quietly sitting there.
And yes, it also has been hit by a reduction in its oil imports, but it has very big reserves of fossil fuels.
And it's also very widely diversified heavily into renewables in the last few years.
So in some ways, it's better protected.
Showing 41–60 of 242 · page 3 of 13
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