Buried Ledger
Buried Ledger — Account 88888
Buried Ledger — One Man's Library
Buried Ledger — The Millionaire's Street
Buried Ledger — The Flower That Outpriced a House
Buried Ledger — The Bubble That Ate London
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Barings had survived the Napoleonic Wars and helped finance the Louisiana Purchase. It didn't survive a twenty-eight-year-old trader in Singapore with an account number nobody in London thought to question. This episode traces how one hidden ledger entry brought down Britain's oldest merchant bank in weeks.
In 1907, with no central bank to call, the United States came within days of a full financial collapse — until one seventy-year-old private banker locked the country's most powerful financiers in his library and refused to let them leave. This episode looks at what it actually took to stop the Panic of 1907, and what it cost to let one man be the one who did it.
In the same months London was losing its mind over the South Sea Company, Paris was doing the exact same thing on an even bigger scale — under the personal direction of a Scottish gambler who had talked his way into running the finances of the entire French state. This is the story of John Law, the Mississippi Company, and the street where the word "millionaire" was born.
In the winter of 1636, a single tulip bulb sold for the price of a house on an Amsterdam canal. Two centuries later, a Scottish journalist turned that frenzy into the legend everyone still quotes about market madness. This episode goes back to the actual Dutch ledgers to find out how much of the story survives contact with them.
In 1720, the South Sea Company's stock rose nearly eightfold in seven months on almost no real trade at all -- and took down fortunes, reputations, and nearly the British government when it collapsed. This is the story of the first modern stock market crash, the ordinary people who lost everything, and the politician who quietly buried the evidence.
Every empire, every fortune, every crash has a paper trail. Buried Ledger digs up the scandals, heists, and dynasties history tried to file away quietly.