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 · last 12 months

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

Appearances

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The Story of Money · The US dollar’s ‘immigrant’ origins · 24 Jun 2026 podcast

So tell us, Brendan, what actually happens to Schlichsilva and the Jochenstala, or the Thala, the forerunner of the dollar, that he birthed almost by accident? matched

Norway was much of an entity in those days. matched

No, it matched

the and were these coins or the were these cow copycat coins all made of silver as well? matched

In some senses, what we're seeing today has echoes of what happened in the sixteenth century. matched

It goes all the way back and shows a continuity um through history. matched

So why did it become so durable? matched

Because you know, the point is that the dollar, the toller, has been around for a very long time. matched

These silver coins were copied widely very, very quickly, and they stuck without sovereign backing. matched

What made them so durable and so trusted? matched

So it's a bit like in some ways, Dara I've said Bitcoin or the alternative non fiat currencies today, which sit outside any government control, but people trust because they think it's, you know, got real underlying scarcity value. matched

But of course the irony today is the dollar is controlled by the US government, isn't it? matched

So when the US dollar was first created, and as you said, the founding fathers sometimes joked about it being an ancient currency, when they took over that word to describe their own currencies later on, the US dollar, did they realise about the link to the past, about the sixteenth century history? matched

How did the word dollar even get come to be used in America at all? matched

Well, that shows the joys of multiculturalism and immigrants, they get the job done. matched

Yes, absolutely. matched

when is someone gonna tell the American government that they're using an immigrant coin? matched

Um, an interloper, but matched

So one of the questions I have is that, you know, you're talking about a copy of a copy of coin. matched

I mean, in a sense you've had that with the fact you now today have a US dollar, you have a Canadian dollar, you've got a New Zealand dollar, Australian dollar matched

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