Central Banks are institutions that manage the monetary policy of a country, or as in the case of Europe, a monetary union. They have an absolute monopoly over the currency and money supply which they achieve by being the regulator of the banking system. As such, one would imagine that they are owned and operated by the government. Although that is now true in many cases, it was not always that way. The nationalization of these institutions started in the 1930s with the Bank of New Zealand and the Bank of France. It continued with the Bank of England being…

In 2019, my wife and I traveled to nine countries, ten US states, and five US National Parks. In March 2020, like everything else in everyone’s lives, our travel streak came to a grinding halt.

As we sheltered in place for the next three months, we sorely missed being on the road and were itching to get back. Now, we are not Travel Bloggers or Social media influencers and our livelihood does not depend on traveling. We travel because we really like to. In June, as the states started opening up one by one, we started contemplating packing our bags…

It was a warm Sunday evening in Washington on the 15th of August 1971, when American President Richard Nixon announced that the US Dollar would no longer be redeemable in gold. This move effectively severed the last thread that connected currency to gold.

For thousands of years, gold was used as the preferred form of currency by many civilizations. …

It was April 1865 and thirty-year-old James Fisk Jr(seen in the picture above) was anxiously awaiting news from the battle that would finally end America’s Civil War. The news and the resultant series of events that he was about to set in motion were going to earn him today’s equivalent of eighty million US dollars in a matter of a few days. This is the story of how Fisk used his understanding of Financial Markets combined with ingenuity that beat even the best news agencies at delivering news across the Atlantic to profit off the war.

A Primer on American Civil War

The industrialized Northern states…

It was December of 1925 when Alves dos Reis was arrested for pulling off the most audacious heists known to mankind. He had injected millions of dollars worth of counterfeit Portuguese Escudo currency notes into the economy and conspired to take over the Central Bank of Portugal, all in one brilliantly engineered conspiracy.

A successful counterfeit currency scheme involves 3 steps

1. Print currency notes that are indistinguishable from the original.

2. Layering forged notes in the economy or Laundering.

3. Avoid detection.

Let us see how Reis pulled off all these three phases with panache.

Reis was born in…

Last week, I discussed how anything can be money as long as someone is willing to accept it. This week, I will delve deeper on:

• How Barter was used in primitive markets and why we moved to Monetary systems?
• Did a collective acceptance of a monetary system simply evolve or was a royal or divine decree involved in its genesis?

The year was 1939 when Richard Radford left Cambridge University, where he was studying Economics to join the British army at the beginning of World War II. In 1942, he was captured by Nazi forces in Libya and sent to…

The year was May 1935, when Józef Piłsudski, Founder of Poland’s military force during the first World War and then Poland’s Chief of State during the interwar period died of cancer. Piłsudski was regarded as a great statesman and a brilliant military strategist. Although when he died, Poland was in an economically dire state. Piłsudski’s successors, military men themselves, were left with the arduous task pulling Poland’s out of it. They summoned professors from a local institute to explain to them how economics works.

When a US court ruled that Bitcoin is money

It was February 2020, when Larry Dean Harmon was arrested for owning and operating Helix, a Bitcoin ‘Cleaning’ business more popularly knows as a Cryptocurrency Tumbler.

Tumblers ‘dilute, co-mesh, and mix identifiable cryptocurrency funds with other funds so as to obfuscate the origin, possession, and movement of cryptocurrencies, for a fee¹’. As you can imagine this service was popular amongst those who did not want to leave a trail of their illicit dealings on the Dark Web.

Harmon was charged with a conspiracy to run a Money transmitting business without obtaining…