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In 1869 the public supply of gold in New York was only about $15 to $20 million, while the country ran on paper greenbacks that could not be exchanged for it. Railroad baron Jay Gould saw that a man with enough money could buy the whole supply and set the price. Only one thing stood in the way: the Treasury held roughly $100 million in gold, and Secretary George S. Boutwell was selling a few milli...

Jack Tramiel started in a Bronx typewriter repair shop in the early 1950s and ended up selling the best selling computer of the 1980s. Along the way his company, Commodore, was nearly destroyed twice by people it depended on: first when its financier Atlantic Acceptance collapsed in a fraud scandal in 1965, then when Texas Instruments began selling finished calculators for less than it charged Com...

The gold standard is remembered as the model of financial discipline, yet no one designed it. In 1717 Isaac Newton, master of the Royal Mint, fixed one gold guinea at 21 silver shillings. The ratio overvalued gold compared with mainland Europe, so merchants brought gold into Britain, bought silver cheaply, and shipped it abroad for profit. Silver drained out of the country, and Britain ended up on...

Isaac Newton's most dangerous opponent was not a rival mathematician. He was William Chaloner, born around 1650 to a poor weaver in Warwickshire and apprenticed to a nail maker in Birmingham, a town notorious for forged groats. Chaloner walked to London in the 1680s, found the guilds closed to him, and worked his way up through the underworld: selling tin watches with hidden sex toys, posing as a...

Savings and loan associations were built to be boring. Neighbors pooled their deposits, and the thrift lent the money back out as 30 year fixed rate mortgages. Then the inflation of the late 1970s arrived, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, and depositors fled to money market funds paying 12 or 13 percent. Thrifts earning 5 or 6 percent on old mortgages were barred by Regulation Q from rai...

After fire burned his wooden Newport house to the ground in 1892, Cornelius Vanderbilt II told architect Richard Morris Hunt to build something that could not burn. The result was The Breakers: five stories of masonry and steel trusses, 70 rooms, almost no structural wood, and a boiler buried in a cavern under the front lawn so that no flame came near the family. Cornelius suffered a stroke in 189...

In the mid 1800s, a stock price traveled only as fast as a runner could carry a slip of paper down Wall Street. Traders in Philadelphia or Boston made do with a single summary once the trading day had closed, which meant acting on prices that had already expired. Then Edward A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company put stock quotes on a dedicated telegraph wire, unveiling his system in New Yor...

Long before spam folders, a letter would arrive sealed in wax from a foreign country. A wealthy nobleman, it said, was secretly imprisoned in Spain under a false identity. He could not reveal who he was, and a loyal friend needed a discreet outsider to put up money to bribe the guards. The reward would be a share of a hidden fortune, and sometimes the hand of the prisoner's beautiful daughter. Thi...

On January 15, 1925, executives from the world's largest light bulb makers met in Geneva and stopped competing. Osram, Philips, Tungsram, Associated Electrical Industries, and General Electric incorporated a Swiss entity called the Phoebus cartel, divided the world's markets, and pooled their patents. Then they turned to the bulb itself. A standard incandescent lamp lasted about 2,500 hours. The c...

In 2007, Fortune magazine photographed a group of former PayPal employees in pinstripe suits around a restaurant table, styled like movie gangsters. The image crowned them the PayPal Mafia. The name stuck because the facts behind it were hard to ignore: a few dozen people from one chaotic payments startup went on to found or fund YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yammer, Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla, and to...

Until late 2000, the New York Stock Exchange priced shares in eighths of a dollar, a habit inherited from merchants who chopped Spanish silver dollars into eight pieces to make change. That detail says a lot about the institution. Behind the screens and the algorithms sits more than two centuries of tradition, panic, and improvisation, beginning in May 1792 when 24 brokers signed the Buttonwood Ag...

In the late 1920s, governments wrecked by the First World War did not always turn to banks for hard currency. Some turned to one Swedish engineer. Ivar Kreuger, born in Kalmar in 1880, lent entire nations millions of dollars, and in return they passed laws giving him the exclusive right to make and sell matches inside their borders. He was known as the Match King, and for a time he functioned as a...

In 1979 an MIT computer science student named J.P. Massar used a Lincoln Lab mainframe to test a claim his friends had brought back from a course called How to Gamble if You Must: that blackjack could be beaten. The math held. What followed was two decades of organized card counting that took millions from casinos in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and beyond, and it looked very little like the book Bri...

Jack Whittaker was not a desperate man when he bought $100 worth of quick pick tickets at a supermarket in Hurricane, West Virginia, on Christmas Eve 2002. He had spent twelve years as president of Diversified Enterprises Construction in Putnam County and was worth more than $17 million. Then one ticket hit a $314.9 million jackpot, at the time the largest single ticket lottery payout in American...

Give 61 people $25 and a coin rigged to land heads 60 percent of the time, and let them bet freely for 30 minutes. In the study at the center of this episode, 28 percent went bust, the average payout was $91 against a cap of $250, 18 players staked everything on a single toss, and two thirds bet on tails at some point. The fix has existed since 1956, when John Larry Kelly Jr. of Bell Labs worked o...

In 2023 the Federal Reserve, the institution that controls the U.S. money supply, posted a record loss of $114.3 billion. That puzzle opens a plain-language tour of how the Fed came to exist and how it works. America's first two central banks were killed off in the 19th century, leaving a free banking era of thousands of currencies and recurring panics in 1873, 1893, and 1907. In the last of those...

In 2003, Chris Moneymaker was a comptroller in Tennessee with a master's degree in accounting and a side job at a restaurant in Spring Hill. He paid $86 to enter an online satellite tournament on PokerStars and won a seat at the World Series of Poker main event, which normally cost $10,000. It was his first live tournament. This episode follows how a man trained to eliminate variance walked into a...

Allen Pace III was paid to find weaknesses in the Dunbar Armored depot on Mateo Street in downtown Los Angeles. As a regional safety inspector, he photographed the interior, drew floor plans, memorized every camera position, and learned that the main vault was left open on busy Friday nights. Then he was fired for tampering with company vehicles. The next night, September 12, 1997, he let himself...

At the peak of Zimbabwe's hyperinflation, a banknote printed with a one and 14 zeros could not cover a one-way bus fare. This episode takes the crisis apart piece by piece, starting from a surprising place: after independence in 1980, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of its region, and its dollar was officially valued above the U.S. dollar. The damage came later. Land reform dissolved the property tit...

Yahoo could have bought Google for $1 million in 1998. It declined. Ten years later it turned down $44.6 billion from Microsoft as too little, then sold its core business to Verizon for $4.83 billion. This episode reads the company's life as a corporate tragedy, beginning in January 1994, when Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo built a human-edited directory called Jerry and Davi...

Wirecard sat on Germany's DAX index with a valuation of 24 billion euros, a celebrated homegrown rival to Silicon Valley. Then, on June 25, 2020, it admitted that 1.9 billion euros, a quarter of its balance sheet, was missing and had probably never existed. This episode reconstructs how the illusion was built. Founded in 1999, the company began by processing payments for pornography and online gam...

From roughly 1836 to 1865, the United States ran without a unified national currency. State-chartered banks printed their own paper notes, each a promise to pay gold or silver to whoever walked up to the counter. Wildcat banks exploited that promise by printing far more paper than they could redeem and, by one account of the name, by setting up shop in wilderness so remote that only wildcats lived...

In late 1922 a loaf of bread in Berlin cost about 160 marks. Less than a year later the same loaf cost 200 billion. This episode traces how an advanced industrial nation destroyed its own money, beginning in 1914, when Germany suspended the gold standard and chose to pay for the First World War with borrowing instead of taxes, betting that a quick victory would let it bill the losers. Defeat left...

At 14, Warren Buffett filed his first income tax return and claimed a $35 deduction for wear on his bicycle and watch, the tools of his paper route. This episode follows that habit of precise accounting through a lifetime of compounding. He sold gum and Coca-Cola door to door at seven, bought a 40 acre farm at 14, and ran pinball machines in Omaha barber shops at 15. Rejected by Harvard Business S...

In the summer of 2024, Toys R Us released a promo made with OpenAI's Sora that showed founder Charles Lazarus as a boy dreaming up a toy empire beside a cartoon giraffe. Viewers found it creepy, and the synthetic memory suits a brand that now lives on as licensed intellectual property. This episode tells the full story, starting in April 1948, when Lazarus opened a baby furniture store called Chil...