Historian Niall Ferguson traces money from its origins to the 2008 financial crisis, arguing that behind every major historical event lies a financial explanation. He walks through the Medici banking dynasty in Renaissance Florence, the birth of bond markets during the Napoleonic Wars, the South Sea Bubble, and the rise of insurance and real estate as tools for managing risk. Ferguson travels to the sites themselves, from the favelas of Chile to the trading floors of Wall Street, interviewing economists and historians along the way to test his thesis against the record. The series treats credit, debt, and speculation not as abstractions but as the engines that built empires and occasionally destroyed them, connecting eighteenth-century French inflation to the American subprime meltdown. Ferguson's own delivery, part lecture and part travelogue, carries the argument, and the series closes by asking whether the crash he is narrating in real time is a correction or the start of something larger.