Series ・ 10 parts

The Birth of Money: 5,000 Years of Currency

In an age when money did not yet exist, how did people exchange things? The inconvenience of barter, primitive currencies such as shells, livestock, and cloth, and the two theories of money's origin — barter and debt. The first of ten episodes tracing the beginnings of 'credit,' the true essence of money.

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01 The End of Barter — Before Money Existed In an age when money did not yet exist, how did people exchange things? The inconvenience of barter, primitive currencies such as shells, livestock, and cloth, and the two theories of money's origin — barter and debt. The first of ten episodes tracing the beginnings of 'credit,' the true essence of money.
02 The Invention of Coinage — Lydia and Ancient China In the 7th century BC, the Lydian kingdom of Asia Minor produced electrum coins of a gold-silver alloy. By making the weight uniform and stamping the king's seal, metal became a 'coin with guaranteed credit.' Around the same time, ancient China grew its own bronze currencies — knife money and spade money. Episode 2 traces the birth of the coin.
03 Currency of the Empire — Rome and the Money Economy Rome bound a vast realm together with a single silver coin. Yet each time its finances faltered, the emperors quietly shaved away the silver inside those coins. From the debasement of the denarius to the chaos of the third century and the failed Edict on Maximum Prices, this is the story of monetary corruption and inflation, read neutrally and grounded in the historical record.
04 Paper Money — The Banknote China Invented A single sheet of paper, worthless in itself, came to carry the same weight as silver or coin — and China was the first in human history to pull off that leap. The Tang feiqian, the Song jiaozi held to be the world's first banknote, the Yuan jiaochao and Marco Polo's astonishment. This is the story of credit becoming money, and the danger that overissue brings, drawn neutrally and grounded in the historical record.
05 The Birth of Banking — The Financial Revolution of the Renaissance In Renaissance Italy, modern banking grew out of the money-changer's table. The Church's wall that made interest a sin, the bills of exchange that climbed over it, the double-entry bookkeeping that brought order to the ledgers, and the Medici. A neutral, fact-based account of a financial revolution in which the craft of handling money came to support art and power.
06 The Gold Standard — Gold That Bound the World After gold and silver, two metals, contended for the throne of money, the world chose gold. The path to gold that Newton opened by chance, Britain's enshrinement of it in law, central banks and convertible notes, and the pound system centered on London. A neutral, fact-based account of how the international gold standard — at once stable and rigid — came into being.
07 The Century of the Dollar — The Turn to Managed Currency Two world wars severed the chains of gold. The Great Depression drove nations to abandon the gold standard, and in 1944 the Bretton Woods system enthroned the dollar as the world's anchor. But in 1971, Nixon halted the dollar's convertibility into gold. What is money backed by? That question begins here.
08 The Explosion of Credit — Card and Electronic Money Money that has lost its backing in gold swells explosively. A single card turns 'pay later' into the everyday, and banks create deposits themselves through lending. Money changes its form from paper into numbers, becoming a vast flow that circles the world. At the end of that expansion, a bubble lay waiting.
09 The Shock of Bitcoin — Money Without a State In 2008, amid a financial crisis, a single paper appeared. A figure calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto laid out a way to send value to one another without states or banks in between. The decentralized money born of the blockchain, swinging between euphoria and collapse, confronted the world with the question of what money truly is.
10 The Future of Money — CBDCs and What Comes Next With the arrival of money without a state, it became the central banks' turn to answer. Central bank digital currencies, the advance of cashless payment, and cash that refuses to disappear. Far out in the digital distance, what is asked is the essence of money unchanged for 5,000 years — a return to the very first question of what trust really is.