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 calcite “Rai” stones once functioned as currency, where owne...
13 Touko 44min
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 named James Brown, a charismatic conman who built a fortune ...
6 Touko 56min
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 America, that technology was the steam locomotive. It knitted the ...
29 Huhti 53min
They are history’s geniuses. But were they any good at investing?
Does scientific, artistic or political brilliance translate into investing success? It’s a topical question with hedge funds today accused of sucking talent away from the rest of the economy. So, the ...
22 Huhti 38min
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 economies today: when people’s debts grow faster than their abilit...
22 Huhti 42min
Introducing: The Story of Money
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that “there can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.” This show sets out to prove the op...
15 Huhti 1min
Finale: The collapse of India’s $22bn tech star
For our final episode: Education start-up Byju’s quickly became the pride of India during the Covid-19 pandemic. But almost as fast as the company rose, it collapsed. The fallout has already resulted ...
1 Huhti 31min
Private credit’s public reckoning
After years of fast-paced growth, private credit is facing intense scrutiny. In recent months, investors have made requests to withdraw billions of dollars from the $2tn sector’s funds. The FT’s US pr...
25 Maalis 27min
