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FT columnist Gillian Tett and FT Alphaville editor Robin Wigglesworth dig into the ideas, personalities and institutions that have shaped the history of finance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Can economics help explain Europe’s deadly witch trials?
Hundreds of years ago, across Europe - from Germany to Scandinavia, France to Britain - tens of thousands of mostly women were executed, accused of being witches. The persecution reached its height in the 16th and 17th centuries. But why? A
The French Revolution's disastrous money experiment - Part 2
The French Revolution was a bloody fight for liberty, equality and fraternity. But it was also a battle over money. In part two of our series on the French Revolution, host Robin Wigglesworth tackles the transformation of France’s monetary
The French Revolution's disastrous money experiment - Part 1
The French Revolution was a bloody fight for liberty, equality and fraternity. But it was also a battle over money. In part 1 of our series on the French Revolution, host Robin Wigglesworth explores the revolution’s economic origins with Re
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 Treasury Secretary William McAdoo who la
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 bloody military disaster and a leader who w
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 hidden indicator? Robin Wigglesworth and Gill
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 trillion in today’s terms. Richer than t
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 as a tool of freedom, and markets and tr
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 also set off a series of events that wo
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 that earned it the nickname “the Crime
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 blindsided the bankers and made him one of Am
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 use. Not only did he found one of the wo
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 legacy isn’t about money. Host Robin Wigglesworth speaks to Pulitzer Prize-
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 Wigglesworth talks to Kim Bowes, author of Surviving Rome: The Economic Live
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, it is how it was paid for. Hosts Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth sp
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 life was immortalised in the roman à clef Reminiscences of a Stock Opera
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 government-backed scheme that promised to turn national debt into riches,
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 major stock market crisis. At the centre of the story was John Blunt,
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”, according to Hettie O’Brien, author of The Asset Class: How Private Equity Tur
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 Greeley, the author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Po
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 returns. But many of those schemes were li
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 convertibility into gold. The “Nixon Shock” as it became known was a
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 citizens fearing for their savings. Instead,
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 country’s first penny savings bank, giv
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 alcohol. Throw in some Russian spies, German
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 ownership and collective trust — rather than
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 producing fake banknotes. In this episod
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 US economy together, driving the nation’
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 FT’s Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth
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 ability to repay them, the entire economic sys
