Edward Chancellor

John "Edward" Horner Chancellor (born December 1962), is an English financial historian, finance journalist, and former hedge fund investment strategist and a former investment banker. In 2016, the Financial Analysts Journal called him "one of the great financial writers of our era", the eldest son of Sir Christopher Chancellor and Mary Jolliffe, who was the daughter of Lord Hylton. The Chancellor family were Scottish gentry who owned land at Quothquan since 1432. His sister is the actress Anna Chancellor.

He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, with first class honours in Modern History, and later from St Antony's College, Oxford, with a Master of Philosophy in Modern History.

Investment career After graduation, Chancellor worked for the investment bank Lazard Brothers in mergers & acquisitions from the early 1990s, and from 2008 to 2014, he was a senior member of the asset allocation team, and of the capital markets research team, at the Boston investment firm Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo & Co. (GMO).

Writing career

Author

In 1999, Chancellor published Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, which made the long-list of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Martin Vander Weyer in the Spectator called the book a much more entertaining version of Charles P. Kindleberger's 1978 work Manias, Panics and Crashes.

In 2022, William J. Bernstein said of the book, "More than 20 years ago, Edward Chancellor's Devil Take the Hindmost supplied readers with one of the most engaging and incisive descriptions of financial manias ever written". Bernstein added, "Besides being a first-rate economic historian, Chancellor is also a master wordsmith; almost unique among serious finance books". The book came from a 2005 report Chancellor wrote for British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey on the growing housing and credit bubble.

In 2022, he published The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, which criticized the orthodox central banking policy of continually lowering interest rates, and using perpetual quantitative easing, to generate economic growth via asset price inflation. A policy that Chancellor predicted had resulted in an everything bubble in asset prices, extreme wealth inequality (particularly between the generations), and that would end in very high levels of price inflation. Martin Vander Weyer praised the book describing it as a more engaging read on the subject area than Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Finance author Felix Martin called the book a "timely warning" of central bank folly, and given the prescient nature of Chancellor's previous two books, said that as well as buying the book, investors should "sell all your stocks".

The journalist John Tierney, in his comments introducing Chancellor at the 2023 Hayek Lecture, said the author possessed "an extremely rare gift" in the timing of his writings. Regarding The Price of Time, for which Chancellor received the Hayek Award, Tierney added, "His book is remarkable not only for its prescience, but also for its erudition and its flair".

Journalist

During and after his period as a full-time investment manager, Chancellor has also provided opinion pieces and articles for the Reuters financial commentary website Breakingviews, and the Institutional Investor. the New York Review of Books, and the Financial Times.

In 2008, Chancellor was announced as the winner of the 2007 George Polk Award in Financial Reporting for his 2007 article Ponzi Nation that he wrote for Institutional Investor. He was the first-ever writer for Institutional Investor to win a George Polk Award.

Awards 2007 George Polk Award – Financial Reporting, for his Ponzi Nation article in Institutional Investor.

Notable works

As author

As co-author The Making of a Permabear. With Jeremy Grantham. Atlantic Monthly Press, 13 January 2026.

As editor Chancellor edited two anthologies of investment reports from Marathon Asset Management (London):

As journalist

, for which Chancellor won the 2007 George Polk Award in Financial Reporting.