Monetary History
From shells and gold to fiat and the petrodollar — how we got here.
- 1 Barter systems Did money really begin with barter? The myth and the evidence.
- 2 A history of currencies Shells, cattle, salt, tobacco, beads and stone wheels.
- 3 Why the world converged to gold The stock-to-flow argument for hard money.
- 4 The pitfalls of gold Heavy, hard to verify, and terrible over distance.
- 5 How gold got centralized Portability + the cost to secure it → warlords → the first banks.
- 6 Religion, usury & interest Why lending was outlawed — and where an antisemitic myth was born.
- 7 Gold receipts — the first paper money Trading claims on gold instead of the metal itself.
- 8 Credit, loans & fractional reserve When goldsmiths noticed nobody audited the vault.
- 9 Gold-backed currency The classical gold standard and its discipline.
- 10 Fiat currency Money by decree, backed by nothing but trust.
- 11 Bank runs The fragility built into fractional reserves.
- 12 World reserve currencies From the guilder and sterling to the dollar at Bretton Woods.
- 13 1971 — the Nixon Shock The day the dollar’s link to gold was cut.
- 14 The petrodollar How oil re-anchored the dollar after gold.
- 15 Austrian vs Keynesian vs MMT Three rival answers to “what should money do?”
- 16 Gold is too slow for a digital age Why hard money and fast settlement seemed impossible — until they weren’t.