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[00:03.07]Welcome to the world of money.
[00:05.92]Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, the readies, the wherewithal.
[00:16.14]Call it what you like, money can break us or it can make us.
[00:22.92]In the past year, it's certainly broken more than a few of the biggest names on Wall Street and in the City of London.
[00:34.22]And while former masters of the universe crash and burn,
[00:37.93]the rest of us are left worrying if our savings would be safer in a mattress than in a bank.
[00:46.26]The great financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has most of us utterly baffled.
[00:52.56]How on earth could a little local difficulty with subprime mortgages in the United States
[00:58.49]unleash an economic tsunami big enough to obliterate some of Wall Street's most illustrious names,
[01:04.88]to force nationalisations of banks on both sides of the Atlantic
[01:08.97]and to bring the entire world economy to the very brink of recession, if not downright depression?
[01:15.70]Shouldn't this series be called The Descent Of Money?
[01:18.94]Well, I want to explain to you just how money rose to play such a terrifyingly dominant role in all our lives.
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