Jay Cooke

Yeah, I have huge FOMO right now because I haven't found the time to see Nolan's Odyssey yet.

But yeah, that's pretty much the Jay Cooke story in a nutshell.

That's the arc of today's story, right? Yeah.

I mean,

And he's a finance guy from the time he's a teenager.

So let's drop into Philadelphia, 1839.

Jay Cooke is 18 years old.

He's come east from Sandusky, Ohio, where he grew up.

If the tech moguls building and financing AI believe that we might be back in 1873, I thought, well, we'd better understand exactly what happened in 1872 and 1873 and the years that followed.

Today, we talk to Liaquat about the bond boom of the 19th century, the mysterious Rothschild family at its heart, Jay Cooke, the mania that leads to bubbles, and the quiet power of monetary policy to fix the inevitable crises of all economic exuberance.

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plain English.

[laughs]

... uh, which is much ruder than James.

But America had its own answers to the Rothschilds in the realm of rising bond markets, and I think this requires us to introduce another main character, who is Jay Cooke.

Tell me first where Jay Cooke came from, starting with the American Civil War.