Gillian Tett

Last Updated on 1 April 2020 by Jan-Paul Steggerda

Gillian Tett has an unparalleled track record at predicting important trends that impact the world. She called the credit crunch crisis three years ahead of anyone else. Her journalistic work, to chart and explain the ensuing global financial crisis is well documented and she has received awards for her work.

More recently, she foresaw the rise of populism, the electoral success of President Trump, and she now warns on the emerging risks posed by certain new types of Fintech — products and services that arise from new types of ‘financial innovation’ and the current lag of effective regulation and governance to manage these activities.

Gillian Tett is Chairman of the US Editorial Board and America Editor-at-Large at the Financial Times. In her previous role at FT, she was Managing Editor (US) and columnist and also oversaw global coverage of the financial markets. Her twice-weekly column earned her recognition as Columnist of the Year

at the 2014 Press Awards. In 2004, Gillian began building a team at the Financial Times to cover capital markets, correctly anticipating the need to watch an industry growing uncommonly fast. By 2007, a year ahead of the curve, she began issuing her news breaking warnings of a looming financial crisis.

Gillian’s current book is The Silo Effect: Why Every Organisation Needs to Disrupt Itself to Survive. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Fool’s Gold, the gripping tale of how a team of Wall Street bankers led by J.P. Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon created the world of ‘shadow banking,’ and then lost control of their creation. Fool’s Gold is a vital contribution to our understanding of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. She also wrote Saving the Sun, about Japan’s financial collapse in the 1990s. She was Japan bureau chief for the FT during their ‘lost decade’. Gillian’s next book will be about why every CEO (and investor) needs their ‘inner anthropologist’ to make informed decisions.

In recognition of her work, Gillian has won several awards, including the UK Speechwriters’ Guild Business Communicator of the Year 2012, the Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards 2009, British Business Journalist of the Year in 2008, and the Wincott prize in 2007. Gillian also received The British Academy President’s Medal 2011, which rewards service to the cause of the humanities and social sciences, specifically or her insightful journalism contributing to public understanding. More recently, she was recognized as Columnist of the Year at the 2014 Press Awards.

Gillian has a PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University, based on research conducted in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She speaks French and Russian and has studied Japanese and Tajik.