Modern stock exchanges couldn’t exist without wires. They are virtual, global, infinitely expanding. Their trading floors are humming servers. But no one ever planned this transformation, and it took many by surprise.

1980s Wall Street was as inventive as it was ostentatious. New kinds of deal turned the relationship between finance and society on its head: collateralized mortgage obligations made homeowners into raw material for profit,

We can’t make sense of contemporary stock exchanges without understanding the huge changes that swept through finance in the 1980s. This episode explores those upheavals at the level of states and markets, and the of lived reality of Britain’s markets:...

Social interactions – rules and rituals, norms and codes of practice – are the glue that holds a stock market together. This was especially so in the open outcry markets of the twentieth century. The episode looks at the strange societies of Chicago’s ...

This episode takes an anecdotal wander through the business of financing start-ups. Our guide is Sixtus, an old-Etonian who imported ‘business angel’ investing to the UK. Along the way, I’m waspish about public schoolboys, perceptive about pickles,

From King William III’s empty coffers in the eighteenth century to David Cameron’s ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ in the twenty-first, penniless governments have had to go cap in hand to the markets. Stock exchanges have always been on hand to hel...

How did Chicago’s stockhouses lead to one of the greatest financial markets on earth? This episode explores how commerce and technology shaped the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade and gave birth to financial derivatives.

Finance matters. We’re off to build a stock exchange, but first of all I’ll spend a little time explaining why financial markets matter. This episode explores how financial markets – a crucial mechanism for the distribution of wealth – are implicated i...