• "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." - William Jennings Bryan [00:00:17]

• "Today on the Story of Money, a seemingly innocuous monetary reform that inflamed American politics for a whole generation, and its unanticipated consequences were so disastrous and caused…

• "he does something unbelievably stupid he starts taking out big bundles of cash from his bank account this gets reported to the FBI who then promptly set up a sting... and they discover he's going to the Emperor's Club... it was a high class escort service" - Jillian Tett [00:00:00]

• "he was a politician hailed as a future presidential contender a…

• "I just felt the story of early Islam is the story of Hayek in Arabia... Hayek of Arabia." - Benedict Koehler [01:29]

• "He was really a supply-side economist of world historical importance." - Benedict Koehler [03:54]

• "Prices are in the hand of God... That's not part of the remit of a…

• "Japan has shown that you can develop rapidly, be successful, and create prosperity without any foreign money whatsoever. What you do need is credit creation." - Prof. Richard Werner [00:02:48]

• "Foreign money, which is always foreign currency-denominated, does not even arrive in the recipient country. Dollars stay only in US banks... it was 100% a…

• "The only way to get a real education in life is to examine each and every one of your mistakes." - Jesse Livermore (quoted by Robin Wigglesworth) [00:00:11]

• "The only thing that is winning is making money and if you lose and lose money it's cuz you were wrong not because you were unlucky." - Robin Wigglesworth…

"Any US trader who wanted to move goods abroad needed to go directly through London." - Demetri Kofinas [00:00:59]

"Information—its creation, organization, and dissemination—played a central role in laying the infrastructure for American financial hegemony." - Demetri Kofinas [00:01:23]

"What I really wanted to…

• "Make Elon Musk look like an amateur... the stock shot up in 1720 from 100 or so, 110 at the beginning of the year up to a thousand by August and back down to the low hundreds by December." - Thomas Levenson [05:02]

• "The bubble is presented as this moral disaster and this sort of insight into the fundamental evils at the heart of capitalism... the thing that's…

• "This whole story is basically exclusively about figuring out how to pay for today's expenses with tomorrow's money." - Thomas Levenson [00:05:35]

• "The business of South Sea company became not banking, not trading—it became stock pumping." - Thomas Levenson [00:33:11]

• "This…

"when communism fell there were three state run banks that were terrible because they lacked two key functions they didn't really take in deposits and they couldn't really lend" - Robin Wigglesworth [00:00:00]

"it was like a bizarre lab experiment carried out on an entire nation that went horribly wrong." - Robin Wigglesworth…

"If you like it's running the financial equivalent of a Potemkin town which looks great on the outside but doesn't actually have real substance behind it." - Jillian Tett [00:04:34]

"Nixon didn't care that much about the global financial system His concern was US domestic policy that it was failing and that he didn't want a international crisis to come…

"When you look at the revolution you've got new country... we tend to assume monetary sovereignty new country new money but that's not what happened... they peg their dollars both during the revolution and after the revolution... to a silver coin." - Brendan Greeley [00:02:09]

"I think of monetary sovereignty as possible but it's hard to…

"I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets." - Richard Nixon [00:02:47]

"In 1955, for example... the US had 165% more gold than it needed to redeem all the dollars outside the US. But by 1970/1971, it only had 25%." - Jeffrey Garten…

"Alexander Hamilton called it the ancient dollar it was already an established uh uh unit of measure it was already an established currency well before the United States" - Brendan Greeley [00:06:55]

"monetary sovereignty is very difficult to achieve and constantly under attack hard one and hard to hold on to" - Brendan Greeley…

"my frustration with this idea of fiat is that it robs us of the power of analysis We can understand money We really can For almost all of our money sits as you guys already pointed out on the ledger of a commercial bank" - Brendan Greeley [00:00:00]

"We did not have a new country We did not call our currency the Washington We called it the…

"it's probably one of the greatest myths of economic history that women have spent most of history as housewives" - Victoria Bateman [00:09:20]

"once you do start to look for women you find them everywhere history is filled with wonderful remarkable women bankers merchants entrepreneurs" - Victoria Bateman…

"In my opinion about three quarters of it would be excellent if only the name of Great Britain was substituted for Germany." - John Maynard Keynes [00:12:28]

"When the facts change, I change my mind." - John Maynard Keynes [00:12:35]

"Why are we going to just keep going on about gold convertible exchange? Can't we…

"Money starts from a set of ideas. It starts from the underlying system of credit and clearing. And then what is used as a token to represent that can actually be anything at all. It could be gold coins or it could be stone discs." - Felix Martin [00:00:00]

"People say it makes the world go round. But the irony is it's also the most successful…

"they would just come up with a plausible sounding name create a bank note that was beautiful and start issuing notes and people would accept them i mean you know what are you going to do check every single note that comes across the store counter i mean people tried but it's kind of a fool's errand" - Stephen Mihm [00:00:00]

"a historian of this…

"If we don't have a million dollars by 10:00 a.m we're dead." - Unidentified New York Partners of Jay Cooke & Co. [00:41:49]

"Like Moses and Washington and Lincoln and Grant I have been I firmly believe God's chosen instrument especially in the financial work of saving the union." - Jay Cooke…

Note: Recorded December 7, 2025 at GoldRepublic's headquarters as part of the 15-year anniversary series "The Future of Gold." Published on 20 May 2026.

"You know, 81 years after the the start of the Breton Woods conference, which was the start of the dollar system... we entered the big reset." - Willem Middelkoop [00:02:05]

"Printing money is practically…