The Story of Money

Butchers, fake deaths and falling from helicopters: History’s craziest frauds

How do you tell if an economy is actually working? Most economics classes point to controlled inflation, steady growth, or low unemployment - but what if the level of fin

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 today’s tech titans, accumulat

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 circle of hell - just one abov

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 turning a sacred "house of praye

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 consequences were huge: years of econo

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 of stock analysts during the do

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 the Arabian desert. And he pu

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 maelstroms. But its most enduring legac

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 precarious. Host Robin Wiggle

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 is not the waterway itself, i

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 Street crash of 1929. His early li

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 the South Sea Company, a gove

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 triggered the country’s first

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 “father of private equity”, accordin

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 Story of Money, Brendan Greele

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

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 – his suspension of the dollar’s

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

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-ce

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