Gillian Tett


Gillian Tett is a British author and journalist at the Financial Times, where she is a markets and finance columnist and U.S. managing editor. She has written about the financial instruments that were part of the cause of the financial crisis that started in the fourth quarter of 2007, such as CDOs, credit default swaps, SIVs, conduits, and SPVs. She became renowned for her early warning that a financial crisis was looming.

Education

Tett was educated at the North London Collegiate School, an independent school for girls in Edgware, in the London Borough of Harrow in northwest London, during which time, at the age of 17, she worked for a Pakistani nonprofit.
After leaving school, she went up to Clare College, Cambridge, where she earned a PhD in Social Anthropology based on field research in Tajikistan in the former Soviet Union. She expressed frustration with an academic anthropology that in her view has been committing "intellectual suicide" and decided instead to pursue a career in journalism.

Life and career

In 1993, Tett joined the Financial Times as a correspondent from the former Soviet Union and Europe. In 1997, she was posted to Tokyo, where she later became bureau chief. In 2003, she became deputy head of the influential Lex column. Tett was then U.S. managing editor at the FT, before working as an assistant editor and columnist before returning to the U.S. managing editor position. She is also the chairwoman of the board of trustees for the Knight–Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism with Columbia University.
During the years 2005–2007, Tett applied her skills in ethnographic research to J.P. Morgan and discovered that the insular culture was leading to the creation of financial instruments that had little basis and that could cause severe economic disruption. In 2006, she predicted the financial crisis. Her 2009 book Fool's Gold recounts the lead-up to the economic crisis and the eventual collapse. She also played a significant role in the 2010 documentary Inside Job about the financial crisis of 2008.
In 2010 Tett interviewed author Sebastian Mallaby on C-SPAN about his book More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite providing a very clear image of hedge funds. Mallaby introduced "James Simons, founder of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund and arguably the most successful investor of all time" but who was virtually unknown in 2010.
Tett is a single parent to two daughters.

''Fool's Gold''

Tett's 2009 book Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe was widely reviewed throughout the English-speaking world and won the Spear's Book Award for the financial book of 2009.

Awards and honours