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Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas once displayed one hundred $10,000 bills in a thick acrylic case: a million dollars in a stack you could hold in one hand. This episode explains where such notes came from and why they vanished. Large denominations, meaning $500 and up, date to the Revolutionary War. North Carolina authorized a $500 note on May 10, 1780, and Virginia reached $2,000 in 1781. They were a wartime answer to the danger of hauling gold and silver by wagon, and they returned in the War of 1812 and the Civil War, dressed in elaborate engraving meant to project authority.

The peak came after Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102 pulled private gold into government hands. In 1934 the Treasury printed gold certificates up to $100,000, bearing Woodrow Wilson, for settling balances between Federal Reserve banks only. No private citizen could hold one. The public notes carried a mix of famous and forgotten faces, and all of them were doomed. Printing ended on December 27, 1945, and on July 14, 1969 the Federal Reserve discontinued them, citing lack of use while also removing a favorite tool of money launderers and tax evaders.

• The $10,000 bill featured Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's Treasury Secretary and the man who introduced the first federal paper currency. James Madison appeared on the $5,000.
• Lesser-known honorees included Union general Joseph Mansfield, Senator Charles Sumner, and Albert Gallatin on the $500, and DeWitt Clinton, George Meade, William Marcy, and Robert Morris on the $1,000.
• A million dollars in $100 bills weighs about 22 pounds, bulk that works as deliberate friction against crime.
• As of May 2009, only 336 known $10,000 bills and 342 $5,000 bills survived. They remain legal tender but are worth far more to collectors than face value.
• Bills introduced in Congress in June 2024 and in 2025 proposed new $500 and $250 notes bearing Donald Trump's portrait.

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By March 1956 a 50-pound bag of onions in Chicago sold for 10 cents, less than the burlap sack that held it. Seven months earlier the same bag had cost $2.75. The collapse was engineered. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange had turned to onion futures in the 1940s after its butter trade dried up, and by the mid-1950s onions made up 20 percent of its volume. In the fall of 1955, traders Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga bought 99.3 percent of the onions and onion futures in Chicago, about 30 million pounds, then told growers to buy the hoard or watch it dumped on the market.

The growers paid, and were betrayed. Siegel and Kosuga took large short positions and manufactured a glut on paper, shipping their rotting onions out of the city, repackaging them, and bringing them back to generate fresh warehouse receipts. This episode follows the fallout: bankrupt farmers, a bill sponsored by Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, and the Onion Futures Act signed by President Eisenhower in August 1958. It also covers what the ban did to the exchange, the long dispute among economists over whether it helped, and why the law is still on the books.

• Stripped of a fifth of its volume and defeated in court, the CME survived by inventing new contracts, including pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange juice.
• Economists Holbrook Working, Roger Gray, and Aaron C. Johnson reached conflicting conclusions on whether futures trading calms or worsens onion price swings.
• Journalist Justin Fox noted that calmer onion prices in the 1960s may owe more to interstate highways and refrigerated trucking than to the ban.
• In 2010, after lobbying from Hollywood, the act was amended to also bar futures on motion picture box office receipts.
• In spring 2026 a University of Chicago student group called For Our Futures handed out raw onions on the quad and collected 131 signatures for repeal, then 99 more at Northwestern.

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The message starts with a friendly hello from an old friend and ends with an invitation to be your own boss. Behind that pitch is a study of 350 companies finding that at least 99 percent of recruits lose money. This episode examines how multi-level marketing sustains a multibillion-dollar industry anyway. The compensation plan pays a little for retail sales and far more for the downline, so sellers are pushed to recruit their own customers as competitors. The product serves mostly as the legal distinction from a pyramid scheme, and the real buyers are the recruits themselves, meeting monthly purchase quotas to stay active.

The numbers are bleak. Newsweek reported that fewer than 1 percent of MonaVie participants qualified for commissions, and a 2018 Vox poll found most sellers made less than $100 in sales over five years. The legal footing traces to a 1979 FTC ruling on Amway that held the model was not inherently illegal, leaving regulators to act case by case. Elsewhere the judgment is harsher: Bangladesh banned MLM trade in 2015, China outlawed downlines, and Saudi Arabia treats it as illegal. Utah, meanwhile, has more MLMs per capita than anywhere in the nation.

• In the 2018 Vox poll of more than 1,000 sellers, 20 percent never made a single sale and nearly 32 percent took on credit card debt to keep participating.
• Amway's defense in 1979 rested on safeguards such as the 70 percent rule and the 10 customer rule, which regulators have little practical means of auditing.
• The FTC shut down Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing as a pyramid scheme and mailed $3.7 million back to victims. Most of its paid reps had earned about $93 a month before expenses.
• Many Islamic jurists have issued fatwas declaring MLMs haram, likening them to riba, or usury, and gharar, meaning deceptive uncertainty in a contract.
• Scholars tie Utah's concentration of at least 15 major MLM companies to missionary training, a culture of self-reliance, and tight community trust. Locals joke that MLM stands for Mormons Losing Money.

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In 1842 Francisco Lopez dug up wild onions in Placerita Canyon and found a gold nugget in the roots. Almost nothing came of it. Six years later, on January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall spotted flakes in the tailrace of John Sutter's lumber mill, days before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California to the United States. Sutter wanted farmers, not miners, and swore his workers to secrecy. The secret reached San Francisco merchant Samuel Brannan, who bought every shovel, pan, and pickaxe he could find and then walked the streets with a vial of gold shouting the news.

This episode follows the rush from that marketing stunt to its long aftermath. Some 300,000 people set out by way of Cape Horn, the fever-ridden Isthmus of Panama, or the cholera-plagued California Trail. San Francisco grew from about a thousand residents to 25,000, and crews deserted so quickly that an abandoned ghost fleet rotted in the bay. Behind the legend sit vigilante justice, a punishing Foreign Miners Tax, the genocide of Native Californians, rivers choked by hydraulic mining, and the birth of the California dream of sudden fortune.

• Brannan bought pans for roughly 20 cents and resold them at enormous markups, profiting from every miner whether or not that miner found gold.
• Abandoned ships were hauled ashore as warehouses, hotels, taverns, and even a jail, then sunk as landfill. San Francisco's financial district stands on their remains.
• The Foreign Miners Tax charged noncitizens $20 a month, roughly $770 today, and was enforced mainly against Latino and Chinese miners.
• Hydraulic mining blasted hillsides with water cannons called monitors, raised riverbeds, flooded farm towns downstream, and released thousands of pounds of mercury.
• Of 40,000 people who arrived by sea in 1849, only about 700 were women, so men took on domestic work and danced with each other, marking roles with a handkerchief on the arm.

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In the winter of 1983, parents shoved and fought in department store aisles for a soft doll with a plastic head. The man credited with inventing it, Xavier Roberts, had not invented its core idea. In 1976 and 1977 a Kentucky craft artist named Martha Nelson Thomas was hand-stitching what she called doll babies and selling them at craft shows with birth certificates and adoption papers. Roberts, a 21-year-old art student in North Georgia, bought her dolls and resold them at a markup. When she cut him off, he had a cheaper version made in Hong Kong, kept the adoption papers, and secured his own copyright in 1978.

This episode traces how that borrowed concept became an empire. Roberts turned an old medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia into Babyland General Hospital, where staff in scrubs charged adoption fees from $60 to $1,000. Licensing agent Roger Schlaifer supplied the name Cabbage Patch Kids and a strange backstory of bunnybees and a villain with a gold mine. Coleco signed on in 1982, shipped 3.3 million dolls in 1983, and helped drive $2 billion in retail sales by 1984. Lawsuits, a bankruptcy, and one alarming product recall followed.

• The dolls were first called The Little People, but Fisher-Price already owned that trademark, which forced the rename.
• Coleco designer Judy Albert gave the mass market version softer bodies, toddler proportions, and molded plastic heads, at a price of about $18 to $28.
• Thomas settled with Roberts out of court in 1985 and said the corruption of her art hurt more than the money. When she died in 2013, her favorite original dolls attended her funeral.
• Roberts's company sued Topps for $30 million over the Garbage Pail Kids parody and settled for $7 million, while Coleco overproduced and filed for bankruptcy by 1988.
• Mattel's 1996 Snack Time Kids used one-way motorized rollers to eat plastic food and ended up chewing children's hair, prompting a voluntary withdrawal.

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On a genuine $100 bill, a line at the base of the lamppost near Independence Hall is printed weakly. In the late 1980s investigators found counterfeit hundreds on which that line was flawless. These were superdollars, or supernotes: fakes on the same 75 percent cotton, 25 percent linen stock as real currency, printed by the intaglio process with raised ink, and carrying magnetic signatures that satisfied bank scanners. Experts identified 19 versions over the years, each fixing earlier weaknesses. Journalist Klaus Bender argued that the tiny remaining differences were deliberate marks that let the makers recognize their own product.

This episode works through the question of who had the means to run what amounted to a parallel mint. A 2002 sting in Manchester, England broke a syndicate holding $3.5 million in fake US cash, but investigators concluded such gangs were distributors, not the source. Washington named North Korea, alleging about $45 million produced since 1989 under the secretive Room 39. Others doubted it, including South Korea, the Swiss Federal Police, and an audit of the Macau bank the United States blacklisted. Rival theories point to Iran, Syria, and even the CIA.

• Telltale signs include clock hands on Independence Hall that stop short of the inner circle and a microscopic extra slash beside the letter N in United States.
• The Manchester gang was recorded boasting it could print half a million fake dollars a day, and the Bank of England admitted its fake ten pound notes were of excellent quality.
• Defectors claimed North Korean diplomats passing through Moscow received travel cash that was half genuine and half counterfeit, often without knowing it.
• U.S. indictments alleged that Sean Garland of the Official IRA moved bulk supernotes from Moscow into Dublin and Birmingham. The Irish High Court dismissed his extradition in 2011.
• The 2013 redesigned $100 bill answered with a woven blue 3D ribbon of microscopic lenses and color-shifting ink that intaglio presses cannot reproduce.

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In 1698 Tsar Peter I came home from a grand tour of Western Europe convinced that Russia had to look modern, and he started with men's faces. Police were authorized to stop bearded men, demand payment, and shave those who could not pay in the public square. For many Orthodox Christians the beard was a religious requirement, part of being made in the image of God, so the decree forced a choice between the state and the soul. When Peter could not shave an empire by force, he taxed it instead, with rates scaled to rank and paid in what amounted to pounds of silver.

This episode follows the beard tax as a lesson in state power and failed economics. Courtiers, officials, and ordinary merchants owed 60 rubles a year, wealthy merchants 100, Muscovites 30, and peasants paid two half-kopeks each time they entered a city. Yet from 1705 to 1708 the tax brought in an average of only 3,588 rubles a year, since most people simply shaved and enforcement ate the proceeds. The story then moves to France, to a persistent Tudor myth, and to Yemen, where the idea was turned upside down.

• Payers received metal beard tokens stamped with a nose, mouth, and bushy beard on one side and the double-headed eagle on the other. Only two of the earliest copper specimens from 1698 and 1699 are known to survive.
• Later tokens were minted in a diamond shape, dated in Western Arabic numerals instead of Cyrillic, and inscribed with the phrase the beard is a superfluous burden.
• Catherine the Great finally repealed the Russian tax in 1772.
• The bearded King Francis I of France won papal approval to tax the beards of priests to fund his wars, which left wealthy court clergy bearded and poor village priests shaved.
• The claim that Henry VIII and Elizabeth I taxed beards has no documentary support in the UK National Archives, while Yemen in 1936 charged clean-shaven men a tax in lieu of growing one.

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Under the seventh century BCE laws of the Locrians, drafted by Zaleucus, a freeborn woman in gold jewelry and a purple-bordered garment had legally declared herself a courtesan, and a man in a sheer Milesian cloak or a gold-studded ring was presumed bent on adultery. These were sumptuary laws, codes that told people what they could wear, eat, and display. This episode traces the two fears behind them. One was economic: imported silk and velvet drained silver from the realm. The other was social: once merchants grew richer than cash-poor nobles, anyone could buy the look of a lord, and the visual order of rank began to dissolve.

The tour runs from Rome, where wearing Tyrian purple without permission became treason and Pliny the Elder complained of the treasury emptied for silk, to Ming China, where the Hongwu Emperor fixed tomb decorations by bureaucratic rank, to Edo Japan, where rich merchants had to dress below indebted samurai. It also shows how badly the laws failed and how openly cynical they were. Historian Lorraine Daston calls them an extreme case of rule failure, Montaigne argued that bans only made luxuries more desirable, and Adam Smith mocked kings as the greatest spendthrifts in society.

• Florence created inspectors called the Officials of Women's Ornaments, yet in 1415 it let any woman ignore the luxury rules for a fee of 50 florins a year.
• England's Caps Act of 1571 required every male over six, nobility excepted, to wear an English wool flat cap on Sundays and holidays or pay three farthings a day.
• In Ming China, only top nobles and mandarins of the first three ranks could set their memorial stele on a carved stone tortoise. Lower ranks got a plain rectangular pedestal.
• Massachusetts Bay in 1634 required a fortune of 200 pounds to wear lace or gold thread, and South Carolina's 1712 slave codes barred enslaved people from any clothing finer than the coarsest cloth.
• The term lived on as an insult: William Howard Taft called Prohibition a bad sumptuary law in 1918, and Bhutan still regulates the color of ceremonial scarves by rank.

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In 1696, under King William III, England needed money and faced a public that regarded an income tax as an intolerable invasion of privacy. The answer was a proxy for wealth that an assessor could count from the street: windows. Every house paid a flat two shillings, with four more for 10 to 20 windows and eight more beyond 20. Adam Smith judged the tax relatively inoffensive in The Wealth of Nations because no official had to step inside. The rates kept shifting, with a 20 shilling tier for 30 or more windows in 1709 and a charge on each individual window by 1747.

The proxy failed as cities grew. Large old houses were carved into crowded tenements, landlords were billed for every pane, and many responded by boarding up the windows and leaving families in darkness during an age of cholera and tuberculosis. This episode traces how a privacy-minded compromise became known as a tax on light and air, the odd exemptions it produced, and the myths attached to it. Not every bricked-up window was a tax dodge, and scholars find no evidence that the phrase daylight robbery comes from the window tax at all.

• Dairies, cheese rooms, and milk houses were exempt, but only if the name of the room was carved into the building itself for the assessor to see.
• In 1841 the Manchester Royal Infirmary was taxed one shilling and nine pence per window for rooms occupied by its medical staff, a bill of one pound, nine shillings, and nine pence.
• Georgian architects obsessed with symmetry built blind windows on purpose when a real one would have opened onto a chimney breast or staircase.
• Scotland imposed its own version in 1748, France adopted a window tax in 1798, and Ireland followed in 1799.
• After a fierce public health campaign in the winter of 1850 and 1851, the UK repealed the tax in July 1851 and replaced it with a tax on inhabited houses. France kept its version until 1926.

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The 1929 crash was the match, not the powder keg. This episode looks past Black Thursday and Black Tuesday to the conditions that turned a market drop into a decade of global misery. The Roaring Twenties ran on wealth inequality and stocks bought on margin, often with 10 percent down. The market briefly recovered in early 1930, then lost 85 percent of its value by 1932. The deeper wound was banking. In December 1930 a private New York lender with the unlucky name Bank of United States collapsed, panic spread, and by 1933 some 9,000 of the nation's 25,000 banks had closed for good.

Policy then carried the damage abroad. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 set off retaliation that cut global trade by more than 50 percent, while the gold standard forced central banks to shrink their money supplies and deepen deflation. When Vienna's Creditanstalt failed in May 1931, capital fled central Europe, German unemployment neared 30 percent, and the Nazi party took power in 1933. At home, the story runs through Hoovervilles, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal, and the argument economists still have about what finally ended it.

• Countries that left the gold standard early, like the UK and the Scandinavian nations in 1931, recovered much faster than France and Belgium, which clung to it in the so-called Gold Bloc.
• In the United States, GDP shrank by 30 percent, unemployment reached 25 percent by 1933, and crop prices fell by up to 60 percent as the Dust Bowl drove hundreds of thousands from their farms.
• Mothers sewed children's clothes from flour and feed sacks, and manufacturers responded by printing the sacks with floral patterns and bright colors.
• Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised Hoover to liquidate labor, stocks, and farmers, a hands-off purge that wiped out healthy capital along with the bad.
• Keynesians argue the New Deal spent too little, while Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz blame the Federal Reserve for letting the money supply collapse. Many historians credit the mobilization for World War II with ending the slump.