Back in the mid-1800s, there was no single national paper currency in the United States. ... As a result, there were a lot of different kinds of money floating about the US back then.

Then some political or technological or financial shock comes along, and suddenly there’s something new: paper money backed by metal, or paper money backed by nothing, or simply numbers on a screen.

Sure, paper money seems weird at first glance but that doesn’t mean it’s a fraud. It’s just weird at first glance. ... Money back then was a copper disc with a hole in it, ...

By 1810, the state had managed to reduce the paper money supply to a little over $200,000. And lawmakers set a new bills-to-specie ratio at 2 to 1, though that was still a goal, not a reality.

Commodity-backed paper money was similar to the tobacco warehouse receipts. ... which could then be sold to pay off the loan. In the mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, ...

I could not help but focus on a few very large size American bills dating to the 1800s, and I wondered how they were carried back then, since they were so large.

Any currency is only truly "backed by gold" if it is convertible to gold. There is something intuitively appealing about the idea of a gold-backed currency - money backed by the tangible value of ...

Paper currency was introduced by the Chinese around 600 A.D. Back then, the Chinese would string copper coins together and carry them around. As the economy grew, ...

When paper money gets mangled, ripped or ruined it is still money, backed by the U.S. government. We visit the room where mutilated money is painstakingly put back together.

Listener Muhammad Arbaz Khan asks: I usually wonder what would happen if paper money suddenly became obsolete altogether and every transaction was required to be digital.