Summer School 4: Banker vs president and the birth of the dollar

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt
0:05.6	through the Schmidt Family Foundation working toward a healthy, resilient,
0:10.0	secure world for all. On the web at the Schmidt.org. This is Planet Money from
0:17.3	NPR. Welcome back everyone to Planet Money Summer School, Economic History of the World.
0:27.0	No dates to memorize, no long essays with footnotes, just the feeling of the temporal
0:32.0	breeze in your hair
0:33.5	as we drive the roadways of history with the top down.
0:37.0	I'm Robert Smith. Today is lesson four,
0:39.7	the age of the panic.
0:41.9	Could you hear the exclamation mark there?
0:43.8	Good.
0:45.0	So far in summer school, we have searched for the origins of money,
0:48.0	watch the workers rise up,
0:49.7	and witness the birth of the finance bro, 400 years ago, but each and every time the story
0:54.4	doesn't seem to end well. There are economic innovations, then people get
0:58.6	greedy, and then the whole thing just collapses. On today's show, the United States is born and says to the rest of the world,
1:06.1	Hold my beer. We are going to invent totally new ways to get rich and then subsequently crash and get poor again.
1:14.1	Our professors today studies early American financial history.
1:17.3	Sharon Murphy from Providence College.
1:19.6	Hey Sharon.
1:20.6	Hi, thanks for having me.
1:21.8	Sharon, one of the interesting things about a new country like the United States is that it gets to invent its own economic system.
	...

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