Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett is US editor at the Financial Times and author of "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). Drawing on her PhD in social anthropology, Tett used an ethnographic approach to analyze how the credit default swap market evolved at JPMorgan and then spread to create systemic risks. Her unique cross-disciplinary perspective — applying anthropological concepts to financial markets — has made her one of the most original financial journalists of her generation. Her subsequent book "Anthro-Vision" (2021) argues that anthropological thinking should be applied broadly to business and organizational management, not only to financial systems. She has also written about the cultural siloes that develop within large organizations and how those siloes prevent institutions from seeing systemic risks until they materialize — a theme directly relevant to the 2008 crisis and later market dislocations.