The Friday Podcast: How Money Got Weird : Planet Money : NPR
In the 1980s, Satyajit Das worked for a finance company that owned a large stake in an airline.
Das got the airline to start making speculative bets on the price of oil. That decision was good for the bottom line: One year, the company made more money from trading than it did from selling tickets on its planes.
But in the long run, Das says on today’s show, this was part of a much larger shift in the global economy — and that shift turned out to be a disaster.
Das started his career in finance in the late 1970s. Around that time, in his words, “money started to get weird.”
This is one of the better explanations I’ve heard of the creation of financial services in business. Worth a listen, for sure.
