Gillian Tett

speaker

1,226 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 2 Sep

Gillian Tett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The Story of Money · 1873: The year America ditched silver as money and all hell broke loose · 2 Sep 2026 podcast

It's the Reconstruction era.

The United States is still piecing itself back together after a bloody and destructive civil war.

You have the venerated Union General Ulysses S.

Grant, who's president, and in February of that year, Grant signs a bill into law called the Coinage Act.

Now, it sounds pretty unassuming, if not rather boring.

But it's actually a monetary time bomb.

So Liaka, tell us about this law.

What exactly was a Coinage Act and why no did why did no one really notice it or care about it initially?

So Liekard, knocking silver out of the equation was incredibly important and it's worth stressing that because today people tend to just talk about gold backed currencies and gold and forget that silver was so important in American monetary history.

Um, so whose decision was it to knock Silver out?

Well these days people would have have much ruder words for different politicians.

But I guess in those days Ohio icicle was quite an insult.

Wow.

So basically he's imported this French idea that not even the French or British government have actually adopted themselves and got this really quite momentous change through Congress.

So when do people wake up and why does it matter so much for the overall m monetary system in the US knocking Zora out?

Right.

So it's a bit like, you know, 'cause we s learnt about this after the two thousand eight financial crisis and they g then again in the early days of the COVID pandemic, when essentially the central banks flooded the market with liquidity to stop

a crisis turning into depression.

But from what you're saying, the very opposite happened as a result of this little noticed silver um

reduction or rather silver being knocked out of the monetary system.

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