Behind the Money

<p>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 the Medici, Rockefeller or Elon Musk, he was the ultimate financial mastermind who bought imperial elections, legalised interest-bearing loans, and inadvertently sparked the Protestant Reformation.</p><br><p>In this episode, hosts Gillian Tett and Robin Wigg

<p>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 trade as vital engines of connection and social mobility.</p><br><p>In this special bonus episode recorded live in front of an audience at the FT Weekend Festival in London, hosts Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth are joined by economist and author David Mc

<p>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 would eventually lead to his death.&nbsp;But what exactly was he attacking? The traders themselves, or the wider economic and religious system they represented?&nbsp;</p><br><p>Biblical scholar Tom Thatcher joins Gillian and Robin to explore the financial wor

<p>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 of 1873”. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Liaquat Ahamed explains how the event squeezed American farmers and fuelled the Free Silver movement, led by the populist firebrand William Jennings Bryan. Host Gillian Tett explores with Ahamed how monetary policy ca

<p>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 America's most popular politicians. People even spoke of him as a possible US president before a scandal ended his political career almost overnight. In this episode of <em>The Story of Money</em>, host Gillian Tett speaks to Brooke Masters, FT US managing ed

<p>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 world’s great religions, but also a model of free-market capitalism that Friedrich Hayek would have approved of. That is the claim of this week’s guest, the libertarian economist and author Benedikt Koehler. He tells hosts Robin Wigglesworth and Gillian Tett

<p>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-winning author Liaquat Ahamed about how the resulting economic malaise fuelled social division and transformed old prejudices into antisemitic conspiracy. It gave birth to ideas that would resurface with catastrophic consequences decades later in the 20th c

<p>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<em> Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent</em>, about how ordinary Romans combined real grit with surprising financial sophistication in order to weather a system that was stacked against them. They uncover a hidden financial world in which women often ran the household