Crazy History Facts About Money

What if money was once live beetles worn as jewelry? Or that Romans shaved gold off coins to fund wars, accidentally inventing inflation? The history of money is far stranger than any economics textbook will tell you. This book collects 5,000 years of the most bizarre, shocking, and genuinely unbelievable true stories about how humans have traded, hoarded, counterfeited, and lost their minds over currency. From Aztecs stuffing cocoa beans with clay to create counterfeits to Chinese emperors printing money so recklessly that citizens wallpapered their homes with it, every chapter delivers something hard to believe. Pirates ran democratic ships with health insurance while hoarding plundered silver. Tulip bulbs once traded for ten times a worker's annual salary before crashing spectacularly. Cowrie shells became currency in the slave trade at a horrifying exchange rate. Napoleon flooded Europe with fake banknotes as a weapon of war. Five thousand years of greed, genius, and spectacular failure told through the strangest true stories in financial history.