Charles Read (historian)

Charles Read is a British economic historian based at the University of Cambridge, where he is Junior Proctor of the University, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and a bye-fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is also a financial journalist who used to write and edit for The Economist.

His research rose to prominence as a result of the financial panic caused by the September 2022 United Kingdom mini-budget, his research on the similar February 1847 budget anticipating the policy mistakes made by the Truss government and for his warnings personally delivered to Kwasi Kwarteng and HM Treasury that the mini budget's policies could lead to financial instability.

Read is also known for predicting the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank at the book launch for his second book, held at the University of Cambridge the evening before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on 10 March 2023. As a result, it has been suggested he has staked a claim to be 'Cambridge's avatar economist for the 21st century'.

Early career
Read was born in London and is of English, Welsh, Armenian and Ethiopian ancestry. He completed BA, MPhil and PhD degrees focussed on economic history at Christ's College, Cambridge, and subsequently worked in research for an investment bank and as a writer and editor at The Economist.

His doctoral research on British economic policy during the Irish famine won more academic prizes for its quality from learned societies than that of any other early-career economic historian of his generation.

After a visiting senior scholarship at the University of Oxford, in 2018 he was elected a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and is currently the college's only full fellow of some ethnic African ancestry. He teaches economics and history for both the university and his college, where he is the founding director of the Corpus Bridging Course, the college's flagship widening participation scheme.

In 2022 he was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Historical Society for his contribution to historical scholarship.

In 2023 he was invited and elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts on the basis of his work in widening access to those from underrepresented backgrounds at Corpus Christi College, particularly his work founding and directing the Bridging Course.

In October 2023 he was elected by the Regent House as Junior Proctor of the University of Cambridge, whose duties include presiding over all meetings of the University's Governing Body. He is the youngest holder of the role in recent times.

Academic work
Read is best known for his two books. The first, "The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis" (2022), challenged much of existing historical opinion that assumed the severity of the famine was the result of British colonialism and laissez-faire ideas. Instead it argued that much of the death toll was the result of austerity the British government was forced to impose after the February 1847 budget that announced borrowing to expand spending on relief triggered the financial panic of 1847. The book is regarded as having anticipated the financial panic in the United Kingdom triggered by the September 2022 United Kingdom mini-budget, which also contained unfunded tax cuts and large scale borrowing to fund relief (in 1847 for Irish famine relief and in 2022 for energy bill relief). He delivered a lecture to civil servants at HM Treasury and wrote to Kwasi Kwarteng, the new chancellor of the exchequer, on 8 September 2022 advising him not to make the same mistakes as the February 1847 budget, which saw a fiscal stimulus pushing up market interest rates and causing a financial panic among investors. His advice was not heeded, and as a result rising interest rates caused a crisis in the defined-benefit pensions sector as the cost of their borrowing for investment overtook the returns that they made from it. Kwarteng was sacked and Liz Truss resigned as prime minister.

His second book "Calming the storms: the Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises since 1825" (2023) provides a new explanation of British financial crises over the past two hundred years with the relationship between the carry trade and monetary policy at the heart of the mechanism. Severe banking crises in Britain disappeared after 1866 as the Bank of England learnt how to use its monetary policy to prevent the carry trade from causing instability. As the Bank of England dropped these policies with the advent of competition and credit control in 1971, financial crises returned with the secondary banking crisis in 1973–75, global financial crisis in 2007-09 and mini-budget crisis of 2022.