Most people think finance begins with capitalism. It doesn't. It begins with a neighbour helping you bring in the harvest, and the unspoken obligation that follows.
In this episode of Sweat Your Assets, we travel five thousand years of financial history — from Sumerian clay tablets and Lydian coins, through medieval Italian merchants and Islamic risk-sharing contracts, to the bridge in Amsterdam where the world's first stock exchange was born.
Along the way, we discover that writing was invented to track debt, that mathematics was built to serve commerce, and that the logic behind modern venture capital was already alive in a Genoese trading contract from eleven fifty-six.
This is not a story about capitalism. It is a story about human cooperation — and understanding it is the first step toward your own financial freedom.
Enjoy.
Sweat Your Assets. Alessandro BARONI
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