The South Sea Company was a British joint-stock company that traded in South America during the 18th century. Founded in 1711, the company was granted a monopoly to trade in Spain's South American colonies as part of a treaty during the War of the Spanish Succession. In return, the company assumed the national debt England had incurred during the war. Speculation in the company's stock led to a great economic bubble known as the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which caused financial ruin for many. In spite of this it was restructured and continued to operate for more than a century after the Bubble. The headquarters were in Threadneedle Street.

The company, established in 1711 by (among others) the Lord Treasurer Robert Harley and the previous director of the Sword Blade Company John Blunt, was granted exclusive trading rights in Spanish South America. At that time, when continental America was being explored and colonized, Europeans applied the term "South Seas" only to South America and surrounding waters, not to any other ocean. The trading rights were presupposed on the successful conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, which did not end until 1713, and the actual treaty-granted rights were not as comprehensive as Harley had originally hoped.

Edward Chancellor is a financial historian, journalist and investment strategist. In 2008, he joined GMO’s asset allocation team. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with first class honours in Modern History, and from St Antony's College, Oxford with a Masters of Philosophy in Modern History. He is a former deputy US editor for Breakingviews.com, and for worked for Lazard Brothers in the early 1990s.

He is a columnist for Financial Times and has written for numerous other publications.

John Fortune (born John Wood; 30 June 1939) is a British satirist, comedian writer and actor, best known for his work with John Bird and Rory Bremner on the TV series Bremner, Bird and Fortune. He was educated at Bristol Cathedral School and King's College, Cambridge, where he was to meet and form a lasting friendship with John Bird.

Fortune was born in Bristol. His early career included contributions to Peter Cook's Establishment Club team, which included Eleanor Bron and John Bird in 1962. Fortune and Bird also worked together on the TV show A Series of Birds in 1967, and Fortune and Bron wrote and performed a series of sketches for TV in Where Was Spring in 1969. In 1971, with John Wells, he published the comedy classic A Melon for Ecstasy, about a man who consummates his love affair with a tree.

He appeared with Peter Sellers in a Barclays Bank advertisement in 1980 shortly before Sellers' death; the infamous Monty Casino ads.

Along with writing several series for the BBC, in 1982 he appeared in an episode of the BBC situation comedy Yes Minister as an army officer who brings the minister's attention to British-made weapons getting into the hands of terrorists.

Charles Mackay (27 March 1814 – 24 December 1889) was a Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter, remembered mainly for his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Charles Mackay was born in Perth, Scotland. His father was by turns a naval officer and a foot soldier; his mother died shortly after his birth. Charles was educated at the Caledonian Asylum, London, and at Brussels, but spent much of his early life in France. Coming to London in 1834, he engaged in journalism, working for the Morning Chronicle from 1835–1844 and then became editor of the Glasgow Argus. He moved to the Illustrated London News in 1848, becoming editor in 1852.

He published Songs and Poems (1834), a History of London, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), and a romance entitled, Longbeard. He is also remembered for his Gaelic Etymology Of The Languages Of Western Europe and the later Dictionary of Lowland Scotch in which he presented his "fanciful conjectures" that "thousands of English words go back to Scottish Gaelic". The linguist Anatoly Liberman has described MacKay as an "etymological monomaniac" commenting that "He was hauled over the coals by his contemporaries and never taken seriously during his lifetime". His fame chiefly rested upon his songs, some of which, including "Cheer, Boys, Cheer", were set to music by Henry Russell in 1846, and had an astonishing popularity.

Michael Mainelli is Chairman of Z/Yen, a commercial think-tank, which he co-founded in 1994. He is Emeritus Gresham Professor of Commerce and Fellow at Gresham College in London, as well as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

Professor Mainelli delivered and published a series of 28 free one-hour lectures on commerce at Gresham College in the City of London while serving as Mercers School Memorial Professor of Commerce from 2005 to 2009. The theme of his programme was “Society’s Commercial Choice – Risks and Rewards of Markets”. The lectures emphasised the proper functioning of markets in realising societal goals, and the obligation on society to try to use market forces wherever suitable, as opposed to unnecessary regulation, hidden subsidy or inappropriate taxation. During the public lectures he presented research on valuing sustainable certification and corporate social responsibility using risk/reward options, applying measurement ranges to audit (Confidence Accounting), developing standards markets, liquidity estimation through supply-demand curve prediction, and discerning the role of 'feedforward' in creating leptokurtic market outcomes. During the series he made observations about sustainability, market solutions to social problems, risk, the role of government, the rising paradox of money as a positional good, taxation, long term discount rates, intellectual property managed as an option, corruption, and lotteries as misery indicators. The lecture series concluded by outlining a more general theory of commerce. Professor Mainelli and the saxophonist John Harle interwove a collage from the lecture series with Benjamin Britten's music, "Metamorphoses: The Terrible Beauty of Change", for the City of London Festival's June 2009 Sustain! programme.