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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 to Labor Day, we are going to take you on a chronological journey to meet the geniuses and near to wells that created the economy as we know it.

By the end, you'll at least know who to blame.

Today we tackle finance. It's more than stocks and

bonds and bros high-fiving and fleece vests, although it is that, it's 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. It's a system that's evolved over centuries. Once

upon a time every business was a small business. It was run by the owner and the spouse and

maybe the kids. They borrowed money from friends and relatives,

but there was only so big that business could get. Then came what can only be described as the big bang of economics.

Over the span of just a few decades people figured out a way for

businesses to sell slices of ownership. We call them stocks and let people trade

those stocks, those shares. Businesses became companies with directors and dividends.

...