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...
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Behind The Money with the Financial Times
From hostile takeovers to C-suite intrigue, Behind The Money takes you inside the big business and financial stories of the moment with reporting from Financial Times journalists around the...
Episodes
20 of 340 episodesThe ‘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...
When Nixon put America first and took the dollar off gold
Today, when people hear the name Richard Nixon, they probably think of Watergate. Few remember another one of his most controversial acts –...
Why Richard Nixon torpedoed the global monetary system
A century ago, when depositors lost confidence in a bank, they’d rush to withdraw their cash. In 1971, US president Richard Milhous Nixon fa...
The 18th-century woman who made saving possible for the poor
Priscilla Wakefield was a Quaker, writer and social reformer who believed financial security shouldn’t be reserved for the wealthy. Living i...
The deal that put the dollar at the centre of the world
Take 730 delegates from 44 countries, plus another 2,000 or so hangers-on. House them in a remote, dilapidated hotel with holes in the roof...
Why money is the biggest shared hallucination in human history
What is money? And what can a small island in Micronesia teach us about how it works? On Yap, a remote island in the western Pacific, giant...
When money went rogue: banking in 19th-century frontier America
In 19th-century America almost anyone could print their own money – and many did. One of the most notable figures to take this up was a man...
Hitting the Buffers: The 1873 railway bust that broke one of America’s greatest financiers
Every now and then a new technology comes along that changes everything – electricity, computers, potentially AI. In mid-19th-century Americ...
How ancient Mesopotamians solved runaway debt
Long before modern economics, rulers such as Hammurabi in ancient Mesopotamia grappled with a political problem that still haunts our econom...