How A New Type Of Money Helped Cause The Great Financial Crisis

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Tracy, you know what's pretty dumb?

Tracy Alloway (0:22)

You're gonna have to narrow that down, I think.

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

It's dumb that we haven't written a book edit. Like all this time, and we like kick around book ideas, but we never do it.

Tracy Alloway (0:31)

Yeah. I mean, both of us are pretty busy with our day jobs, but yes, I would love to write a book, and we have discussed some ideas.

Joe Weisenthal (0:41)

Yeah, we have. We talked about maybe doing one on bubbles.

We've talked about maybe doing one on this crisis, perhaps, and also one of our recurring themes on the podcast is the question of what is money. We've even talked about maybe doing a book just to think about what money is from our perspective.

Tracy Alloway (0:58)

Now, first of all, you're giving away all our good book ideas, and some people are gonna rush out and do them before we get a chance. But yeah, I mean, we've done so many episodes at this point about the nature of money and how it works. I mean, stretching from sort of anthropological takes way back in prehistory and all the way up to cryptocurrency and digital money and things like that.

Joe Weisenthal (1:25)

Anyway, you're right. I mean, the thing is at this point, though, there is no reason to worry about someone stealing our idea to write a book about money, because it's already been done. People are already way ahead of us on this, including our guest today. So really, at this point, we can just sort of, I think, kill that idea, because other people have longed with us to the point.

Tracy Alloway (1:48)

Yeah, and I have to say, the guest that we are about to have on has written a very good book on the subject of money. So we don't want to go up against that kind of competition.

Joe Weisenthal (1:59)

Absolutely right. So we're just going to vacate the field to our current guests, and hopefully as people listen to the conversation, they'll see the good work has already been done on this. But it is a really important topic, and so even if other people beat us to the book, we can still do the podcast. And so without further ado, I'd like to bring in our guest for the day. He is Jacob Goldstein. He is the author of a new book, Money, The True Story Of A Made-Up Thing, which is a great title. And he is also the longtime co-host of Planet Money, Jacob Goldstein. Thank you very much for joining us.

Jacob Goldstein (2:32)

I'm happy to do it. Thanks for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (2:35)

So Tracy and I have been doing this podcast for a few years, and we were like, let's do a book about money, and we never do. So you did your podcast for a long time.

You actually did what Tracy and I only talk about.

But what was it about that you were attracted to money as a subject in its own right?

Jacob Goldstein (2:53)

I mean, as a sort of set of history stories, it's amazing as a way of just understanding how people and society sort of get through the daily living. It's amazing. You know, at Planet Money, I had done all of these kind of one-offs. Like, you know, I did a story about free banking in America when there was like 5,000 different kinds of paper money, and merchants had to get special magazines to figure out what paper money was good and how much it was worth. And I'd done stories about the depression and the gold standard.

But like, I realized that if you sort of zoom out, there's a very long arc, this kind of series of origin stories of money being invented and reinvented and changing over time. That makes what I think is a good book, what I hope is a good book.

Tracy Alloway (3:40)

So one of the daunting things, I think, about approaching a subject like money is just where to begin. How did you go about starting?

What was your jumping-off point for the book?

Joe Weisenthal (3:56)

Well, we're looking for tips, basically.

Jacob Goldstein (3:59)

Don't do it. That's my tip on writing a book. It was very lonely. I think writing a book together is a great idea. I mean, basically, what I tried to do was make a series of origin stories, right? So there is, I mean, you guys have talked about, I know, Joe, you've talked about on Twitter. I don't recall if you talked about on the show, sort of the myth of barter.