Economy
Discover facts about economy. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Economy
When paper money was backed by church land
When you decapitate your king, you inherit his debts. To solve this, the newly formed French Republic seized all Catholic Church property and issued…
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How Latvians bought homes with privatization vouchers
When Latvia broke free from the USSR in the early 90s, the state owned almost everything. Their solution to kickstart capitalism was handing out privatization…
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The tariff fight that helped spark a global trade war
In a masterclass of legislative self-sabotage, US politicians decided to "protect" domestic farmers during the Great Depression by passing the Smoot-Hawley…
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Stalin executed an economist for predicting capitalism's recovery
In the 1920s, Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev made the fatal mistake of doing his job too well. After exhaustively analyzing global markets, he…
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How central banks lost control of gold prices
In 1961, eight of the world's most powerful central banks formed an elite financial cartel with one desperate goal: artificially keep the price of gold pegged…
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J.P. Morgan locked bankers in his library during a panic
Before the Federal Reserve existed, the US economy’s safety net was literally just a grumpy 70-year-old billionaire. During the Panic of 1907, the stock…
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The economist who proved communities can share resources
For decades, economists loved quoting the 'Tragedy of the Commons,' a deeply cynical theory claiming that humans are selfish monsters who will inevitably…
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Why a private currency led to a terrorism charge
Threatening the US dollar's monopoly is a quick way to find out just how heavily armed the Treasury Department is. In 1998, Bernard von NotHaus launched the…
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The 1907 short squeeze that helped crash a bank
Forget GameStop; the original short squeeze disaster happened in 1907 when F. Augustus Heinze tried to corner the global copper market and spectacularly…
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The bankers who ran a protection racket
Long before the Federal Reserve existed, a cartel of wealthy Boston bankers set up the Suffolk Banking System to ruthlessly kneecap their rural competitors.…
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Mexican debt swap triggered global market panic
In 1994, the Mexican government thought it would be absolutely brilliant to issue short-term sovereign debt heavily pegged to the US dollar to show…
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One vague word helped create megabanks
Wall Street lawyers are the undisputed masters of semantic gymnastics. Section 20 of the Glass-Steagall Act explicitly forbade commercial banks from being…
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Why markets need traders who are wrong
Economist Fischer Black broke Wall Street's heart by proving that financial markets desperately require 'noise traders'—investors who trade on absolute…
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The historian who said money was never just barter
If you want to get completely blacklisted by orthodox economists, just tell the truth about where money comes from. Alexander del Mar was the first director…
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When economists stopped counting only cash
Central bankers used to think they could control the economy simply by counting physical cash and bank reserves. Then the 1959 Radcliffe Report dropped a…
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How Israel's banks manipulated their own shares
In a textbook case of 'who is supervising these people,' Israel's major banks spent the late 70s and early 80s systematically manipulating their own stock…
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Announcing your financial ruin ahead of schedule
If you're going to devalue your currency, doing it by surprise is standard protocol. In the late 70s, Chile’s central bank tried an insanely arrogant approach…
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Bartering accidentally reinvented credit scores
In the 1980s, anti-capitalist communities decided to ditch fiat currency entirely and trade services using Local Exchange Trading Systems. You fixed a sink to…
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When the CFA franc suddenly lost half its value
Fourteen African nations woke up on January 12, 1994, to find their life savings were worth exactly half as much. France, backed by the IMF, abruptly devalued…
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How polite memos steered Japan's economic boom
Japan’s postwar economic miracle wasn't driven by strict Soviet-style central planning or pure free-market magic. It was largely orchestrated by MITI…
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The plan that would have made banks hold every deposit
Fractional reserve banking is basically a legal magic trick where a bank takes your deposit, loans out 90% of it to someone else, and hopes you don't both…
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When copper crosses were money
Standardized currency doesn't always fit neatly in a bifold wallet. For centuries in the Democratic Republic of Congo region, the premier currency was the…
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Europe tried a shared currency long before the euro
The Euro was not Europe's first attempt to aggressively force different countries to share a wallet. In 1865, France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland formed…
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What if your town paid in hours
Why slave away for a federal dollar when you can just print your own money backed by nothing but the sheer promise of human labor? In 1991, an activist in…
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