How the US financed World War I using Charlie Chaplin and Girl Scouts
The first world war was one of the deadliest conflicts the world has ever seen. And when the US entered the war in 1917, it faced a massive financial challenge: how to pay for its contribution? Enter ...
7 Okt 40min
The bloody birth of the bond market
The US Treasury market - the world's largest government bond market - is worth about $32tn today, making it the largest pile of debt accumulated in history. But its roots lie in medieval Venice, a blo...
30 Sep 43min
Does history show that fraud is the sign of a healthy economy?
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 financial fraud is the real hidde...
23 Sep 45min
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, accumulating a fortune estimated at $4 ...
16 Sep 43min
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 above Lucifer. James Joyce saw it ...
12 Sep 41min
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 prayer" into a "den of robbers", he...
9 Sep 51min
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 economic pain and political turmoil...
2 Sep 41min
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 dotcom bubble. His crusade blind...
26 Aug 46min
