Imagine waking up tomorrow and every bank in America is closed. Not just yours. All of them. No withdrawals, no cash, no way to make payroll. And nobody can tell you when it ends.

That happened. In March of 1933, every bank in the country was shut down for about a week. And when they reopened, Americans lined up not to pull their money out, but to put it back in.

In this episode of the History of Money series, Karl Eggerss explains what was actually breaking. Why the banks, not the 1929 crash, are what made the Great Depression great. Why your money has never sat in a vault, and why that isn't a scandal but the entire business model. How a bank run traps everyone into destroying a bank that would otherwise have been fine. And what happened on the Sunday night when a president got on the radio and, instead of telling 60 million frightened people to trust him, explained to them exactly how banking works.

Out of that week came the FDIC, which Franklin Roosevelt himself initially opposed, along with most of the banking industry. Their objection was that guaranteeing deposits would let reckless banks compete on equal footing with careful ones. That argument never went away, and the bank failures of 2023 brought it right back.

Karl closes with the practical part: what FDIC insurance actually covers, what it doesn't, and why the phrase "per ownership category" means many people are leaving protection on the table without knowing it.

October 19, 1987. The Dow fell 22.6% in a single day. It's still the worst day in the history of the American stock market, nearly double the worst day of the 1929 crash. And here's the part almost nobody remembers: the market finished that year up.

In this first episode of the History of Money series, Karl Eggerss walks through what actually happened on Black Monday. Why an expensive market, rising interest rates, and a currency fight set the stage. How a strategy called "portfolio insurance", sold to pension funds as a way to protect against losses, became the thing that turned a correction into a collapse. What the Federal Reserve did on Tuesday morning, when the real danger wasn't falling prices but a financial system that was close to seizing up entirely. And why an investor who simply did nothing that day was made whole within a couple of years.

But this isn't a tidy story, and Karl doesn't tell it that way. Plenty of people were genuinely ruined in 1987, almost all of them investors who had borrowed money. The circuit breakers created afterward are still debated today. And the underlying condition that caused the crash, automated selling that feeds on itself, arguably exists in greater volume now than it did then.

A look at the difference between a bad day and a bad outcome.

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, just told The Economist that money won't matter a decade from now. Not that it'll look different, but that it won't matter. And he laid out the mechanism: AI and robots producing more goods and services than humans can possibly consume, governments simply issuing money to people, and deflation instead of inflation because output grows faster than the money supply.

In this episode, Karl Eggerss takes the argument seriously rather than dismissing it. Also, he finds that part of it is textbook-correct and part of it falls apart the moment you push on it.

What we get into:

• Why technology really is deflationary, and the history that proves it
• The one thing robots can't manufacture — and why it breaks the whole prediction
• Baumol's cost disease, explained with a string quartet
• Why abundance is a production question and universal income is a distribution question
• What Keynes got right in 1930, and what he got completely wrong
• Five practical adjustments for planning in a split-price economy

The most likely version of the next decade isn't "money stops mattering." It's that ordinary goods keep getting cheaper while the scarce things like land, care, healthcare, time keep getting more expensive. That distinction changes how you plan.