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

Not quite the first, but almost the first.

What was the South Sea Company and the South Sea bubble?

So I always think the South Sea bubble is a bit like the subprime mortgage bubble or even the AI bubble today in that you have something dramatically big happening, whether it's a technology breakthrough or a new area of the world that's being explored that everyone gets wildly excited about.

No one really understands because it's halfway around the world or basically very geeky and scientific.

And so this wild mania starts to emerge that infects everything, even though the actual workings of it are completely misunderstood.

So whatever measure you want to use, he was mega rich on the back of what seemed like a very canny investment during the South Sea bubble.

But more importantly, he got the timing right in terms of getting out, which is always one of the hardest things in any kind of bubble.

But you said that then something went wrong.

Was that a case of FOMO or YOLO?

You know, you only live once or FOMO, fear of missing out.

Was it just looking at everyone else getting rich and thought, I want to be even richer?

Why did he do that?

And do we have any indication in the records of how and why he felt about all that?

And if he'd actually been provost for kings, as he had tried to be, maybe it wouldn't have happened.

He probably wouldn't be allowed to do all that.

So isn't that ironic?

Exactly.

How to not succumb to too much YOLO and FOMO.

And there's quite a wonderful passage in Andrew Ross Hawkins' book, 1929, where he talks about this and says there's a part of Winston Churchill falling in love with the go-getting, risk-taking, bold, ambitious spirit of America.

And he actually criticised the UK for a while for being so timid and passive, as opposed to being so risk tolerant, like the Americans he kept encountering on his book tour.

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