2024-08-01
36 分钟Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School. Planet Money Summer School has arrived at the birth of the United States and the chance to set up a whole new economy from scratch. Should there be a centralized bank? Should there be a single currency? We'll travel to two moments in the country's early history when the founders said "nope" to these questions and see what happened. First we'll witness one of the great economic battles in U.S. history – the president of the United States versus the president of the Bank of the United States – and see how the outcome ushered in an age of financial panics. Then we'll drop in on a time before the U.S. dollar existed as we know it, when you could buy things using one of about 8,000 forms of money circulating in the country. We watch as the Civil War leads to the first standard currency. Along the way, we'll learn why the cycle of economic booms and busts persists to today despite efforts to centralize America's economy throughout history. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina. Subscribe to Planet Money+ for sponsor-free episode listening in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
Support comes from our 2024 lead sponsor of Planet Money, Amazon Business.
Everyone could use more time.
AmazonBusiness offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin.
Learn more@amazonbusiness.com dot this is Planet Money from NPR.
Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money summer school, economic history of the world.
No dates to memorize, no long essays with footnotes.
Just the feeling of the temporal breeze in your hair as we drive the roadways of history with the top down.
I'm Robert Smith.
Today is lesson four, the age of the panic.
Could you hear the exclamation mark there?
Good.
So far in summer school, we have searched for the origins of money, watched the workers rise up and witness the birth of the finance bro 400 years ago.
But each and every time, the story doesn't seem to end well.
There are economic innovations, then people get greedy, and then the whole thing just collapses.
On Todays show, the United States is born and says to the rest of the world, hold my beer.
Were going to invent totally new ways to get rich and then subsequently crash and get poor again.
Our professor today studies early american financial history, Sharon Murphy from Providence College.
Hey, Sharon.
Hi.
Thanks for having me, Sharon.