Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett is a prominent British journalist, author, and editor renowned for her expertise in financial markets and her pioneering application of anthropological perspectives to economics and finance. She serves as US Editor-at-Large and Chair of the Editorial Board for the Financial Times, where her insightful commentary on global finance, risk management, and corporate culture has earned her widespread acclaim. Tett is best known for her prescient warnings about the complex financial instruments that precipitated the financial crisis of 2007–2008, as detailed in her award-winning book Fool's Gold.

Early life and education

Born in Ilford, London, Tett was raised in a family with a strong academic background; her mother was a psychotherapist and her father a biochemist. She attended Clare College, Cambridge, where she initially studied English literature before switching to social anthropology, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She subsequently pursued a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, conducting extensive fieldwork in rural Tajikistan during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, focusing on marriage rituals among Tajik communities. Her doctoral research, which involved learning the Persian and Russian languages, was later published as a monograph and cemented her analytical approach to understanding social structures and cultural silos.

Career

Tett began her career in journalism in the early 1990s, joining the Europa Publications reference unit before moving to the Financial Times in 1993. At the Financial Times, she held various posts, including a stint as a correspondent in the former Soviet Union based in Brussels, where she covered the European Union and emerging markets. She later served as the Financial Times's Tokyo bureau chief, reporting on Japan's economy and banking sector. In 2005, she was appointed Capital Markets editor in New York City, where she began investigating the burgeoning market for credit derivatives and securitization, work that positioned her to foresee the coming financial crisis. Following the crisis, she became the Financial Times's US Managing Editor and later assumed her current roles as US Editor-at-Large and Chair of the Editorial Board, shaping the newspaper's coverage of American politics, the Federal Reserve, and Wall Street.

Awards and recognition

Tett has received numerous accolades for her journalism and contributions to public understanding of finance. She was named Columnist of the Year at the 2009 British Press Awards and received the Wincott Award for financial journalism. In 2014, she was honored as Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. Her book Fool's Gold won the Spear's Book Award for financial journalism in 2009. Tett was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to journalism. She also serves on the board of the Guardian Foundation and has been a frequent speaker at institutions like the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Publications

Tett is the author of several influential books that bridge anthropology, finance, and society. Her most celebrated work, Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (2009), provides a definitive account of the origins of the financial crisis. She followed this with The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (2015), which examines how organizational fragmentation harms institutions from Sony to the Bank of England. Her third book, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life (2021), argues for the applied value of anthropology in understanding markets, technology, and consumer behavior, drawing on case studies from Facebook to the Bank for International Settlements.

Personal life

Tett is married to Japanese-born environmental economist Sawa Nakajima, with whom she has two children. The family divides their time between New York City and London. An accomplished linguist, she speaks French, Russian, and Japanese, in addition to the Persian and Tajik learned during her fieldwork. She is a patron of the Royal Anthropological Institute and actively promotes interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and the business world.

Category:1967 births Category:Living people Category:British journalists Category:Financial Times people Category:Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire