From the early 80s to the early 2000s gold hardly moved at all, what caused it's stagnation, and what then caused it to begin to grow post 2004?

I suppose this sounds like a leading question but I’m slightly confused. Today, when people talk about budget shortfalls for the NHS or other public services, they mention the lack of high taxes on the 1%.

Some mention the pre-thatcher tax rates as examples of the good old days but, weren’t the 70’s really bad economically for the UK? Where was the money going?

My favourite is the development of the American economy in the late 19th century, for how it accounts for the rise of the USA as a global power and also how it had ingrained itself into the cultural milieu of its time.

Was it mostly trading is how Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg got so rich or was it something else. All three countries Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg are inland and no big body of water making trading by shipping not possible.

I hear Hong Kong and Singapore got rich by trading and gateway to Asia. But Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg have no water like Hong Kong and Singapore and also Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg from my understanding was not gateway to Europe.

Was there just a lot of wealthy aristocracy and nobles in Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg was the banking system different there than other counties at that time?

I’m not as much a supporter of the US government as I am curious as to why rhis happened and the motives behind it. Did J.P Morgan extend their power over the American people? I mean they didn’t do it for public good. I feel like that should be obvious.

Was America negatively affected by the abolition of slavery? What were the arguments of the proponents of slavery in the Western world at that time?

I’m reading a novel which uses the term ‘rich as Croesus’, which made me then think of Moguls, Ottomans, Sultans, and then Rockefeller etc. In today’s monetary value, has anyone ever been richer the richest person today? Thank you.

I ask because today we have men like elon musk, jeff bezos and mark Zuckerberg with a combined net worth in the trillions, but in 1920 men like Vanderbilt, rockefeller and jp morgan had wealth in the %of the US gdp, (Rockefeller alone was 3% of the US GDP)

I am Bulgarian American and spend my summers in Bulgaria, and I have noticed that a lot of older generations still keep cash at home instead of using banks, and there is a general wariness toward financial institutions and financial advice that seems to run deeper than just personal preference. This seems to hold across a lot of the former Eastern Bloc, not just Bulgaria.

I am trying to understand the actual historical roots of this. I know the Soviet banking system, things like Gosbank, functioned more as an accounting arm of the planned economy than as a bank in the way we would think of one today, and I know the 1990s and 2000s brought a wave of financial crises across the region, Bulgaria's hyperinflation and banking collapse in 96 and 97, Albania's pyramid scheme collapse in 97, Hungary's Swiss franc mortgage crisis, Latvia's 2008 collapse. But I am curious how historians actually connect those events to the financial behavior we still see today. Is this well documented as a case of intergenerational transmission of institutional distrust, or is that too simple a read on it?

Would appreciate any insight, sources, or corrections to how I am currently thinking about this. Currently working on a research paper and would love to hear (and even get help from) and expert.

I’m wondering where the US, UK and Europe got the cash to build factories and industrialized? Was it mostly because of slavery and colonies with resources extraction. With out that they would have not had the cash to build factories and industrialized?

Is scarcity the main drive of how the history develops into how it is now or how the world organises itself?

I’ve been reading about the Bank Restriction Period. In 1797 the Bank of England stopped exchanging its notes for gold, and that lasted over twenty years, right through the Napoleonic Wars.

What surprises me is that it didn’t end in a currency collapse like the French assignats a few years earlier. There was inflation, and the Bullion Report in 1810 argued the Bank had over-issued, but the pound came through it and convertibility was restored in 1821.

So what made the difference? Was it the Bank’s reputation, the expectation that gold would eventually come back, Parliament’s credibility, or just that Britain was winning the war? I’d also love to know how ordinary people and businesses experienced it day to day. Did they actually trust the notes, or were there workarounds?

Any book or paper recommendations would be great.

Like any history, history of economics must also contain some myths in it. What are some of those, that you know of??

I have been dipping my toes into economic and general history of the 20th century over the last few years. A few that I've enjoyed have been The Wages of Destruction, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century, Postwar, The Devil's Chessboard, and Hobsbawm's Ages series: Revolution, Capital, Empire, and Extremes.

I also recently read Misha Glenny's McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, which made me reconsider the post-war economic narrative I'd been reading about, particularly in light of the clandestine network of US Intelligence and organized crime touched on in The Devil's Chessboard. Not to mention the ongoing revelation of corruption etc. coming to light in the Epstein Files.

I guess what I'm looking for is a pretty ambitious reconsideration of the global postwar economy that considers corruption, the black market, and any other ugly economic realities as fundamental blocks of global trade, rather than as exceptions or deviations, or pop-history curiosities. I know such a work is unlikely to exist at the scale and depth as normative economic histories for a number of reasons, but even books that attempt to outline something of this sort would be welcome.

Thanks in advance.

First thing to say is that I know nothing about economics beyond a few classes in college, so forgive me if this question is naive.
I often notice the date 1928 or 1929 on the cornerstone of many American elementary/high schools, College buildings, athletic stadiums, churches, and office buildings in the east coast and midwest. I notice it so often that it made wonder if there was some sort of construction boom in the last few years of that decade that contributed to the stock market crash? The sixth-grade answer I've always understood for the root cause of that the crash was fueled by rampant speculation on stocks. But I'm curious if there was some sort of construction bubble, or supercharged growth in commercial real estate, that occurred during this period as well? Or is this observation purely a coincidence?

I’m not an economic historian, and so have no idea if this is a dumb question. I’ve been assigned readings about the ‘great divergence’, and I keep seeing versions of this graph. I have a quick question about the calculation of GDP per person; does anyone know if the population of the Netherlands, for example, includes the populations of Indonesia, Suriname, South Africa (etc)? And if not…. Why? As in, domestic product in this case is colonial product, so it wouldn’t make sense to exclude colonial labor supplying this product as part of the GDP per person calculations, right?

I know the basics of economics, like supply and demand, opportunity cost, wants and needs, interest rates, loans, etc., but I want to get into reading some economic theories and economics. Are there any recommendations for books, articles, or videos which I could go through and read or watch?

I was thinking about cannabis and asked ChatGPT to help me imagine what the world could look like if hemp had never been prohibited.
My theory is pretty simple: what if marijuana was used as a scapegoat?
The flower gets associated with drugs, crime and danger, and then the entire plant gets treated as something suspicious. But *Cannabis sativa* is also an incredibly versatile industrial crop: textiles, paper, rope, oil, food, construction materials, biocomposites, etc.
And this is the part that makes me suspicious.
If the main reason for prohibition was really public safety, why such a huge historical crackdown on cannabis when it doesn’t have the same acute lethality as things like opioids, while alcohol — which causes enormous numbers of deaths and health problems — remains legal?
What if the real concern wasn’t just people smoking the flower, but the **industrial potential of the plant itself**?
Imagine if hemp had been continuously developed throughout the 20th century. Millions of farmers, including in poorer countries, could have grown it and built local industries around it. It could potentially have competed with cotton, timber, plastics and other materials.
I’m not saying “Big Oil definitely banned cannabis” or that this is proven. This is a theory I came up with myself.
But could the drug narrative have been a convenient scapegoat that helped keep a highly versatile industrial crop out of major markets?
Or is this just connecting dots that don’t actually connect?
I’d genuinely like to hear arguments from both sides.

Actual UK firm death and entry rates during 2008-2013 fell well short of what a 1990s-style recession would predict, even though the 2008 crisis was deeper and more global. This gap sits at the center of the UK "productivity puzzle" debate — some economists argue ultra-low interest rates and lenient bank forbearance kept unproductive "zombie firms" alive that should have failed, dragging down aggregate productivity by tying up labor and capital in low-value uses. Others argue it shows crisis-era interventions (cheap credit, employment support schemes) successfully prevented an unnecessary wave of firm destruction that would have made the recession worse without any productivity benefit.

Genuinely curious which explanation people here find more convincing — is lower firm churn during a downturn a sign of misallocation, or a sign policy worked as intended?

Source: Alina Barnett et al. (2014), The Productivity Puzzle, Works in Progress

Hey Reddit, had a random shower thought and wanted to pick your brains. I realised that DeBeers, the big name in making diamonds super popular, was founded in 1888, quite a while after the British took possession of the Kohinoor in 1849. This got me wondering – did the Kohinoor become more valuable after DeBeers started hyping up diamonds, or has it always been a hot commodity through history(especially for us Indians)? I'm just an engineering student who likes to mull over historical stuff, so correct me if I'm off base here!

Did the massive government spending during WWII actually cure the Great Depression and create real wealth? Or was it just an illusion of prosperity because everyone was put to work making things meant to be destroyed?

As stated in the title.

Before becoming hyper focused on banking and real estate I am of the notion that Hong Kong had a robust and possibly extremely outsized production economy. To thr point that it was ranked high in some specific sectors.

Is this notion correct?

Correct or not, was it robust?

If it was robust how did they manage considering it is a micro nation/colony without large areas for farming, factories, refineries or warehouses?

Was it a place that assembled good as opposed to processing (semi) processed materials?

Generally what is the history of the Hong Kong economy from, say, 1910 to now?

Including the transition to majority banking and real estate.

Book suggestions on the topic are welcome.

Thank you.