The French Revolution's disastrous money experiment - Part 2
The French Revolution was a bloody fight for liberty, equality and fraternity. But it was also a battle over money. In part two of our serie...
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20 of 348 episodesThe French Revolution's disastrous money experiment - Part 1
The French Revolution was a bloody fight for liberty, equality and fraternity. But it was also a battle over money. In part 1 of our series...
How the US financed World War I using Charlie Chaplin and Girl Scouts
The first world war was one of the deadliest conflicts the world has ever seen. And when the US entered the war in 1917, it faced a massive...
The bloody birth of the bond market
The US Treasury market - the world's largest government bond market - is worth about $32tn today, making it the largest pile of debt accumul...
Is fraud the sign of a healthy economy?
How do you tell if an economy is actually working? Most economics classes point to controlled inflation, steady growth, or low unemployment...
Meet the Fuggers: Europe’s richest family ever
Long before Silicon Valley, the grandson of a 15th Century German peasant named Jakob Fugger built a mining and banking empire that dwarfed...
Why Dante put bankers in hell and James Joyce didn't
Is money a tool of moral decay or a force for human liberation? Dante feared money would corrupt and damn us, placing bankers in the eighth...
He expelled the money changers. So was Jesus anti-capitalist?
What did Jesus really think about money? When he overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple in Jerusalem, accusing them of tu...
1873: The year America ditched silver as money and all hell broke loose
In 1873, Ohio senator John Sherman quietly helped pass a law that stopped Americans from turning silver into official US money. The conseque...
The ‘Sheriff of Wall Street’ who exposed bankers’ lies
He was the bruiser of Wall Street. In the early noughties, New York attorney-general Eliot Spitzer took it upon himself to expose the lies o...
Mohammed: prophet, trader . . . and capitalist?
Did you know that the Prophet Mohammed was a caravan trader? He helped arrange convoys of thousands of camels carrying valuable goods across...
How a stock market crash gave birth to modern antisemitism
The 1873 Gründerkrach, the spectacular stock market crash that followed Germany’s unification, is one of history’s great financial maelstrom...
The hidden financial world of ancient Rome
Ancient Rome is often depicted as a glamorous empire of power, sophistication and wealth. Yet for most people, the reality of daily life was...
The canal that shaped American finance
The construction of the Erie Canal is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in American history. But its most influential legacy...
The trader who made $100mn from the 1929 crash — only to lose it all
Jesse Livermore was a legendary trader who made and lost several fortunes in the early 20th century, most famously by shorting the Wall Stre...
The financial crash that created Britain’s first prime minister
When the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720, it wiped out fortunes and plunged Britain into its first great stock market crisis. The collapse of...
South Sea Bubble: the shoemaker’s son who sparked Britain’s first financial crisis
In 1720, the South Sea Company was one of the most valuable businesses in Britain until a spectacular collapse in its publicly traded shares...
The 1980s Garfield buyout that changed corporate finance
William E Simon was a bond trader-turned US cabinet secretary under President Richard Nixon. He was also abrasive, polarising and the “fathe...
The US dollar’s ‘immigrant’ origins
Today, when you think of a dollar, the US dollar probably comes to mind first. But that hasn’t always been the case. In this episode of The...
The financial scams that brought Albania to the brink of war
In the mid-1990s, Albania appeared to be a nation on the rise. Emerging from decades of isolation and communist rule, people poured their sa...