Twenty pieces, written to be read in order — each one stands on its own, but together they run from what money is to what it means for you now. New here? Start with The Stone at the Bottom of the Sea. Stories are history; Explainers answer one question from the beginning. Every figure links to its source.
Start with a rock at the bottom of the sea and a burrito you cannot pay for. Between them they explain what money is for.
01 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 19, 2026 · 9 min read
An island treated a sunken stone as wealth and a man with black paint proved them right. Before you call it quaint: the story ends in a Manhattan vault with men in suits.
Topic: Money history · Companion tool: How Much Does a Million Dollars Weigh?
02 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Your burrito costs a cube of gold 1.7mm across. The objection is correct, and it is about divisibility — gold is not a debit card, it is a fire extinguisher.
Topic: Gold & silver · Companion tool: What Is Your Junk Silver Worth?
Two thousand years of the same trick, from Rome’s silver coin to a Sunday evening in 1971, and what is left holding the dollar up.
03 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 21, 2026 · 8 min read
Rome invented shrinkflation and applied it to the money itself. Then Diocletian made raising prices a capital offense, which is setting your kitchen on fire and prosecuting the smoke alarm.
Topic: Money history · Companion tool: The Silver Quarter Machine
04 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 22, 2026 · 9 min read
A Congressman explained exactly what would happen, was ignored, and watched it happen. Millions of people who had never heard of Gresham kept the heavier coin and were right.
Topic: Money history · Companion tool: The Silver Quarter Machine
05 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 23, 2026 · 9 min read
Income tax was temporary too. Sixteen people came down a mountain in Maryland having suspended the dollar’s link to gold, temporarily, and the word “temporarily” is still on the job.
Topic: Money history · Companion tool: Your Salary, Weighed in Gold
06 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 24, 2026 · 9 min read
Two IOUs propping each other up like a pair of drunks, anchored by the one institution that accepts nothing else. Every link in that chain is somebody’s promise.
Topic: Inflation & the dollar · Companion tool: Your Dollar Since You Were Born
What the metals did once nothing tied them to the dollar: a decade of fireworks, a squeeze that ended at halftime, and the buyers who print money.
07 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 25, 2026 · 9 min read
Gold went from $41 to $615 an ounce in nine years, then spent twenty-eight years failing to beat its own record. Both halves of that sentence have one cause.
Topic: Gold & silver · Companion tool: Your Dollar Since You Were Born
08 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 26, 2026 · 8 min read
Two Texans owned a cube of silver twenty-seven feet on a side and were right about all of it except the part that mattered: who gets to change the rules of the exchange, and when.
Topic: Gold & silver · Companion tool: The Gold-to-Silver Ratio
09 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 27, 2026 · 10 min read
Net buyers every year since 2010, and 863 tonnes in 2025 alone. The institutions that can create currency at will are spending it on the one reserve asset that is nobody’s promise.
Topic: Gold & silver · Companion tool: How Much Does a Million Dollars Weigh?
The same history measured in things you can picture: three safe deposit boxes, a Model T, and a solar panel.
10 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 28, 2026 · 9 min read
Three safe deposit boxes, filled with $10,000 each in 1970, opened this morning. One of them was a felony to fill, and it is not the one you would guess.
Topic: Inflation & the dollar · Companion tool: Your Dollar Since You Were Born
11 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 29, 2026 · 9 min read
A Model T cost $850 in 1908 and $260 by 1924. Priced in silver instead of dollars, those numbers say something quite different about which one of them moved.
Topic: Money history · Companion tool: What Is Your Junk Silver Worth?
12 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 30, 2026 · 11 min read
Photovoltaic silver demand is falling, not rising, and the engineers are doing it on purpose. The supply case is real anyway, and the reason is stranger than the demand case.
Topic: Gold & silver · Companion tool: The Gold-to-Silver Ratio
How much gold exists, why anyone wanted it in the first place, whether the inflation number can be trusted, what happens when a central bank decides what interest rates are allowed to be, where new money comes from in the first place, how big a trillion really is, why banks get runs, and what happened when Germany printed its way to a 4.2-trillion-mark dollar.
13 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Oct 3, 2026 · 10 min read
Every ounce ever mined would fit in a cube about as long as a tennis court on each side. Most of it is jewelry, a slice is in Fort Knox, and Canada kept none.
Topic: Gold & silver · Companion tool: How Much Does a Million Dollars Weigh?
14 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Oct 3, 2026 · 10 min read
Walk the periodic table crossing off everything that floats away, catches fire, rusts or kills you. One square is left, and it is number 79.
Topic: Gold & silver · Companion tool: The Gold-to-Silver Ratio
15 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Oct 4, 2026 · 12 min read
The steak-for-hamburger story is a myth. The month the inflation number went missing is not. How the index is built, what it gets right, and what it was never asked.
Topic: Inflation & the dollar · Companion tool: Your Dollar Since You Were Born
16 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Oct 4, 2026 · 9 min read
What happens when a central bank decides what interest rates are allowed to be: a wartime peg, a seven-year experiment in Japan, and an exit Australia's own review called disorderly.
Topic: Inflation & the dollar · Companion tool: Your Dollar Since You Were Born
17 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Oct 19, 2026 · 12 min read
Most new money is not printed. It is typed, by an ordinary bank, the moment it approves a loan. Where dollars really come from, what the Fed adds, and what happens when you pay a loan off.
Topic: Inflation & the dollar · Companion tool: What Inflation Did to Your Savings
18 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Oct 24, 2026 · 10 min read
A trillion dollars in $100 bills is a ten-hour drive laid on its side, and a trillion seconds is the last Ice Age. The US owes about forty of them and adds one every five months.
Topic: Inflation & the dollar · Companion tool: How Much Does a Million Dollars Weigh?
19 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Oct 24, 2026 · 11 min read
Why no bank can pay everyone at once, how a rumor turns into a line around the block (or a $42 billion day on phones), and what deposit insurance really covers.
Topic: Inflation & the dollar · Companion tool: How Much Does a Million Dollars Weigh?
20 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Oct 25, 2026 · 11 min read
A dollar cost 4.2 marks in 1914 and 4.2 trillion in 1923, and somebody papered a wall with the money. What caused it, who lost, and how a currency with a hard limit ended it in weeks.
Topic: Money history · Companion tool: Your Dollar Since You Were Born