Documentaries on the history of money: coins, banks, crashes and the people behind them, researched from primary sources and told one story at a time.https://historybehindmoney.com/enhttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/smoot-hawley-tariff/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/smoot-hawley-tariff/The Smoot-Hawley Tariff became more burdensome as prices collapsed during the Great Depression. But Congress never voted on that extra increase. In June 1930, Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1930 and Herbert Hoover signed it. That vote happened in the open, 44 to 42 in the Senate. This documentary is about what came afterwards: how deflation took a law that was already on the books and made it heavier, year after year, without anyone changing a word of it.Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:27:34 GMTCrisesModernhttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/spanish-treasure-fleets/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/spanish-treasure-fleets/The Spanish piece of eight never lost a grain of silver in three centuries. It was the most trusted coin on Earth, legal tender from Amsterdam to Manila to the United States. And the empire that minted it, the empire pulling more silver out of the ground than the rest of the world combined, went bankrupt four times in forty years while that coin was in circulation. This is the story of how Spanish silver ruined Spain. We follow the silver from the moment Diego Hualpa finds it at Cerro Rico in 1545, through the forced labour of the mita and the mercury amalgamation introduced by viceroy Francisco de Toledo, into the treasure fleet convoys organised by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the ledgers of the Casa de Contratación in Seville. Then we watch what happens when it lands. Earl Hamilton's archival price series show Spanish prices rising four to seven times over a century and a half, the Price Revolution, at a moment when nobody alive had ever seen prices move at all.Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:43:03 GMTInflationEarly modernhttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/why-gold-became-money/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/why-gold-became-money/Out of one hundred and eighteen elements on the periodic table, humanity ended up using one as money. That wasn't an aesthetic choice or an accident of culture. It was an elimination test, and almost every element failed it. In two thousand eleven, Planet Money handed the periodic table to Columbia chemical engineer Sanat Kumar and asked which element you could build a currency from. He didn't pick one. He crossed things out. Gases blow away. Lithium and cesium catch fire. Einsteinium kills whoever carries it. Iron rusts, copper turns green, osmium is too rare to ever gather, and platinum melts at temperatures no ancient furnace could reach. Silver survives almost to the end, then tarnishes. This video runs that test from start to finish, then puts it to the ultimate proof: aluminum. The most abundant metal in Earth's crust, it was worth as much as silver in eighteen eighty-four and capped the Washington Monument. Two years later a chemist made it cheap, and it stopped being money forever.Tue, 06 Oct 2026 01:36:34 GMTGoldAncient to modernhttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/roman-empire-inflation/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/roman-empire-inflation/The economics of the Roman Empire's collapse, explained through one object: a Roman silver coin from the year two hundred and seventy that has almost no silver left in it. This documentary traces two centuries of currency debasement, from the denarius of Augustus at ninety-five to ninety-eight percent silver, through Nero's quiet reform after the great fire, to a coin that was bronze dipped in a silver wash. It explains why inflation in ancient Rome was a policy rather than an accident, what Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices actually did, and the detail most retellings skip: the Roman state was the first party to stop trusting its own currency, collecting taxes in grain and cloth while still minting coins it declared by law to be valuable. It ends with the honest historical verdict on whether inflation really destroyed Rome, and with the same experiment repeated on paper fifteen centuries later in revolutionary France.Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:55:12 GMTInflationAncienthttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/great-depression-explained/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/great-depression-explained/The Great Depression explained through the part most retellings leave out: between 1929 and 1933, roughly one-third of America’s money supply disappeared. The stock market crash did not cause a decade of misery on its own. As frightened depositors rushed to withdraw their savings, around 9,000 banks failed. Deposits vanished, lending collapsed, spending fell, and the United States entered a destructive spiral in which every failed business and bank erased still more money from the economy. This documentary follows that monetary collapse from the speculation of the 1920s and Black Tuesday to the Federal Reserve’s failure to act, the Smoot–Hawley tariff, the Dust Bowl, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 bank holiday. It also examines the myth of Wall Street bankers jumping from windows, the debate between monetarist and Keynesian explanations, and the creation of federal deposit insurance that finally helped stop the bank panics.Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:06:24 GMTCrisesModernhttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/history-of-banking/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/history-of-banking/The complete history of banking, from the clay-tablet loans of ancient Mesopotamian temples to the banking app on your phone. This documentary traces how banks were invented and reinvented across six thousand years, and why the word "bankrupt" literally comes from a broken bench. Banking has always been the business of trust, and every banking crisis in history is fundamentally the same crisis: too many people wanting their money back at once. From Babylon's temple lenders and the Code of Hammurabi, to the Knights Templar's medieval letters of credit, the Medici dynasty that bankrolled the Renaissance, the London goldsmiths who accidentally invented fractional-reserve banking, and the founding of the Bank of England, this is the full story of how money came to be kept, lent, and multiplied — and how it keeps breaking and rebuilding.Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:24:25 GMTBankingAncient to modernhttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/what-is-money/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/what-is-money/What is money, really? A hundred-dollar bill is just cotton and linen with ink on it, and yet people trade hours of their lives for it. This documentary explains where that value actually comes from. It starts on the island of Yap, where four-ton limestone discs served as currency and one of the most valuable stones sits at the bottom of the ocean, still counted as valid money. From there it traces the whole arc: barley in ancient Sumer, the Mesopotamian shekel, the first Lydian coins, Chinese promissory notes and the world's first fiat currency, Isaac Newton's accidental gold standard, Bretton Woods, and the day Nixon closed the gold window. It ends on the shift happening right now, as one hundred and thirty-seven countries explore central bank digital currencies. The throughline is a single idea: money is a shared illusion built entirely on trust, and every form it has ever taken works only because enough people agree that it does.Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:39:02 GMTOriginsAncient to modernhttps://historybehindmoney.com/videos/complete-history-of-money/https://historybehindmoney.com/videos/complete-history-of-money/Money did not start with coins or paper bills. It started with a problem: barter's double coincidence of wants. This documentary follows six thousand years of money in ten minutes, from Mesopotamian barter, cowrie shells and salt wages to the first electrum coins of Lydia, Chinese paper money, the gold standard, Bretton Woods, Nixon's 1971 shock and Bitcoin. The throughline: the story of money is really the story of trust.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:39:31 GMTOriginsAncient to modern