The story inside
Part 1The Origins of Money
It begins long before coins. The Aztecs priced a rabbit at ten cocoa beans and a tamale at one, and people still found a way to counterfeit cocoa beans. On the island of Yap, a family was counted rich for a stone that had sunk to the ocean floor generations earlier. So what, exactly, makes money money?
Part 2What Is Money?
Then money becomes a promise. In 1640 Charles I seized some £130,000 in private gold kept in the Tower of London, and the way out of that tight spot ended up inventing something we all carry. Three centuries later, Charles de Gaulle sent French navy ships to New York to take France’s gold home. What had stopped him trusting the dollar?
Part 3The Banking System
Banks are older than anyone expects. In 1150 a French knight deposited his gold with warrior monks in Paris and collected it in Jerusalem, and not one coin made the journey. In Florence, in 1397, the Medici opened a bank in an age when interest was a mortal sin. And one night in November 1910, six men who had agreed to use first names only boarded a private railroad car at Hoboken.
Part 4Interest, Debt, and Inflation
Last comes the price of time. Benjamin Franklin left roughly a thousand pounds each to Boston and Philadelphia, on the condition that nobody touch it for two hundred years. In Berlin in 1923, someone stole a woman’s suitcase and left her banknotes on the sidewalk. And Hammurabi canceled every debt in his kingdom four times, not out of generosity.