History of Money Series: The Bank Holiday of 1933 - The Week America Closed Every Bank

Imagine waking up tomorrow and every bank in America is closed. Not just yours. All of them. No withdrawals, no cash, no way to make payroll. And nobody can tell you when it ends.

That happened. In March of 1933, every bank in the country was shut down for about a week. And when they reopened, Americans lined up not to pull their money out, but to put it back in.

In this episode of the History of Money series, Karl Eggerss explains what was actually breaking. Why the banks, not the 1929 crash, are what made the Great Depression great. Why your money has never sat in a vault, and why that isn't a scandal but the entire business model. How a bank run traps everyone into destroying a bank that would otherwise have been fine. And what happened on the Sunday night when a president got on the radio and, instead of telling 60 million frightened people to trust him, explained to them exactly how banking works.

Out of that week came the FDIC, which Franklin Roosevelt himself initially opposed, along with most of the banking industry. Their objection was that guaranteeing deposits would let reckless banks compete on equal footing with careful ones. That argument never went away, and the bank failures of 2023 brought it right back.

Karl closes with the practical part: what FDIC insurance actually covers, what it doesn't, and why the phrase "per ownership category" means many people are leaving protection on the table without knowing it.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(353)

If $5,000 Is Good, Why Not $50,000? What History Says About Government Checks

A $5,000 check for every American adult sounds great. So why not $50,000? Why not a million? The proposed "Trump Dividend" has put government checks back in the headlines. Karl Eggerss looks at what h...

12 Syys 29min

History of Money Series: When the Fed Took Rates to 20%

In the early 1980s, homebuilders started mailing two by fours to the Federal Reserve. Car dealers mailed in keys to cars nobody could finance. Farmers drove their tractors to Washington and parked the...

5 Syys 24min

This Isn't 2008: What Wall Street Is Actually Building Around AI Debt

A post was written on the internet this week warning that Wall Street is quietly building the same kind of products that blew up the housing market in 2008. It had real numbers in it. It was a scary p...

29 Elo 24min

The Worry List Is Long and Stocks Keep Going Up

Long rates hit their highest level since 2007, the national debt topped $40 trillion, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced he's doubling long-dated bond buybacks. Karl breaks down what that ...

22 Elo 24min

History of Money Series: Black Monday 1987 - The Worst Day in Market History

October 19, 1987. The Dow fell 22.6% in a single day. It's still the worst day in the history of the American stock market, nearly double the worst day of the 1929 crash. And here's the part almost no...

8 Elo 28min

Money Won't Matter in 2036 - Should You Believe It?

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, just told The Economist that money won't matter a decade from now. Not that it'll look different, but that it won't matter. And he laid out the mechanism: AI a...

1 Elo 20min

It's Groundhog Day on Wall Street - Until It Isn't

There's a war in the Middle East, oil is spiking, tariffs are back, and Big Tech is spending like never before. If it all feels like Groundhog Day, that's exactly the problem. The market can shrug off...

25 Heinä 22min