Support comes from our 2024 lead sponsor of Planet Money, Amazon Business.
Everyone could use more time.
Amazon Business 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.
I should put some echo on that.
Here's my coffee mug.
Economic history of the world.
Thousands of years of learning squeezed into eight simple lessons.
In each show, we will tackle the biggest questions in economics by going back to the moment when we first started asking them.
I'm Robert Smith, and this is lesson three, the birth of finance.
Every Wednesday till Labor Day, we are going to take you on a chronological journey to meet the geniuses and nerdowells that created the economy as we know it.
By the end, youll at least know who to blame.
Today we tackle finance.
Its more than stocks and bonds and bros high fiving and fleece vests, although it is that.
Its also a sophisticated system for moving money through time and space, channeling resources in theory to just the right person and project to make ideas into reality.
And, yeah, also make people rich.
Its a system thats evolved over centuries.
Once upon a time, every business was a small business.