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 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

So he was like the worst of the meme traders or day traders, that kind of equivalent back in the 1920s.

We can call it Winston Churchill the meme trader.

So Memo, being a day trader is not always a very good idea.

So let's turn to somebody who actually did crush the market rather than Winston Churchill or Isaac Newton.

What about Charles Darwin?

He's a father of evolutionary biology, but was he actually any better at doing financial investments?

So can you just unpack what it means to be a fixed income arbitrage in the early 19th century?

Well, at least he got a painting of King's College out of it all, I guess.

I mean, we have quite a famous watercolor of that as well.

And while we're talking about King's College, there is someone else we have to talk about as well, which is John Menne Canes, who was the father of much of the modern macroeconomic analysis that shapes us today.

but also he managed the endowment at King's College, Cambridge, and he was what we call the bursar, the chief treasurer.

How did he do, given that he's so well known for his brilliant economic insights?

But there's two things that I, as I understand it from college law, and I should say, I actually have this portrait hanging up on my wall.

It's actually of John Mennecane's because he dominates King's College.

And we have his letters and diaries in the archives here.

But there are two caveats.

Firstly, as I understand it, he kind of blew up a bit in the 1920s.

And so the fact he outperformed later was partly as a result of having messed up the 1920s and learned the right lessons.

And then secondly, he had a huge aversion to real estate and got the college out of some of its real estate, which at the time most of the other colleges in Oxford and Cambridge were still invested in.

Which looked kind of good for a while, but if you fast forward 100 years, some colleges like Trinity, just near King's College, hung on to their real estate portfolio and are actually a lot richer than any other college today as a result.

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