Who Invented Money and Banks: Planet Money : NPR

Planet Money Summer School is back! It’s a free economics course that you can take anywhere… for everyone! This summer we’ll travel through time and space to learn about the origins of our economic way of life.

Everything we take for granted in the economy today has its origins. When you hear about automation taking away jobs, banks failing, inflation surging, strange new forms of money, or another round of tariffs, you might say, “I know why this is happening! We’ve been through this before.”

In the first episode, we start by answering some perplexing questions: What is money? Where does money come from? To find out, we travel to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean where there is a currency in the form of giant round stones. We then travel to France in 1714, where a fugitive tries to overhaul the country’s entire monetary system, and gets close to the modern economy we have today, before everything falls apart.

We will be airing our summer school programming every Wednesday through Labor Day. Find Past Summer Schools. and Follow the video Summer School on TikTok.

The series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.

Help support Planet Money and listen to our extra episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ In Apple Podcasts or plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

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Music: NPR Source Audio – “Lost Situation,” “The Sermon,” “Midnight Surf,” “Sunny Beach Beat,” “Uptown Shadows,” “Not Time,” “Step Over It,” “Mambo Mystic,” and “Time to Spare.”