When a king came to the throne, one of the very first things he did was to cancel everyone's debts.

It was, I'm sure, an incredibly popular thing to do.

It's also something that kind of cleans the slate of all the problems that had existed prior to his reign.

He now has people who are not desperate anymore.

We can come back to the details later, but it is remarkable how much this was obeyed,

that people did this, that the lenders really did break the tablets on which the loans were

recorded. People were free, and it must have been an amazing feeling.

Hello, and welcome to The Story of Money, a brand new podcast from the Financial Times,

where we rummished through the past to make sense of the financial present and the future. Because if there's one thing that finance has taught us, it's that people keep making the same silly mistakes.

And these days, we might use Bloomberg terminals, spreadsheets, and special purpose vehicles,

but you can get into just as much hilarious trouble with a simple abacus.

Or to put it another way, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it and lose money.

I'm Gillian Tett, anthropologist, turned FD columnist, and that background means I love looking at all the rituals and symbols and occasional historical absurdities of the financial world and show you why they matter today.

And I'm Robin Wigglesworth, also an FD journalist, editor of our finance blog, Alphaville,

and someone who is therefore spent far too long staring lovingly at charts.

So together we're going to tell the stories behind money, how it's shaped empires, top of

economies, and occasionally made some questionable

ideas seem brilliant, at least for a bit.

Yes, this will be a finance podcast for history geeks and a history podcast for finance geeks.

And well, if you're sadly neither one, we're going to try our hardest to make you it.

So whether you're a financier, a student, a historian, or just someone who wants to understand

what the hecker bond actually is...

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