Summary
What is the money in your pocket really worth?
Come to think of it now we’re virtually cashless, do you even keep money in your pocket?
Maybe you’re worried about the growth of government debt during the pandemic you now store your wealth in commodities such as gold or silver? Or maybe you’re a fan of another asset class: bitcoin. Are cryptocurrencies the future of money or a giant bubble waiting to burst?
Why are governments and companies such as Facebook so interested in developing their own digital currencies? Fifty years on from the ‘Nixon Shock’, when President Richard Nixon changed global currencies forever by taking the US off the gold standard, the BBC’s Ben Chu is on a mission to find out what money means to us today.
Where does its value come from in this increasingly online world? Are we witnessing a revolution in the transfer of value into the metaverse? And how should make sense of this funny money business?
Guests include:
Historian Niall Ferguson
Economist and academic Stephanie Kelton
Investor Daniel Maegaard
Investment strategist Raoul Pal
Financial commentator Peter Schiff
Economist Pavlina Tcherneva
Producer Craig Templeton Smith Editor Jasper Corbett
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello, thanks for listening to this edition of Analysis, the podcast that looks at some of the ideas behind the news. |
| 0:44.5 | In this edition, Ben Chu, economics editor of Newsnight, asks who, |
| 0:49.7 | in an increasingly digital world, decides what has value. |
| 0:57.0 | In the 1964 film, James Bond had a mission to thwart Orrick Goldfinger's nefarious designs on the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. |
| 1:12.0 | The villainous gold dealer wasn't |
| 1:14.8 | interested in stealing the US's national reserves of precious metal. That was |
| 1:18.9 | too logistically challenging. Instead, with the help of communist China, he planned to contaminate it by detonating a dirty bomb in the |
| 1:27.8 | vaults and thus effectively remove the gold from international circulation. |
| 1:33.0 | It's an inspired deal. |
| 1:35.0 | They get what they want, economic chaos in the West, |
| 1:39.0 | and the value of your gold increases many times. |
| 1:42.0 | Brilliant. But why would irradiating the world's biggest |
| 1:46.3 | gold reserves plunge economies into turmoil? The answer is that almost every Western country was signed up to the 1944 Breton Woods Agreement and at the heart of that agreement was a |
| 2:06.2 | commitment by the United States to convert dollars into gold on demand. |
| 2:19.0 | So much for Ian Fleming's spy fiction. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.