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 savings into investment schemes that promised extraordinary re...
17 Jun 50min
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 faced a similar dilemma. But his problem wasn’t ordinary citiz...
3 Jun 39min
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 in late 18th- and early 19th-century England, she founded the...
27 Mai 46min
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 and broken furniture. Deliver a train wagon filled with alco...
20 Mai 53min
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 Mai 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 Mai 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 Apr 53min
