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
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 put his commercial nous to good ...
19 Aug 48min
