About
An almanack of markets, money & memory — written and edited by Marcos Vega.
The Money-Printing Press is a publication about financial history: how money has been made, lost, debased and reinvented, and what the record actually says when you go back and read it. Each piece starts from primary material — ledgers, correspondence, the minutes of panicked committees — rather than from the received summary.
The premise is that the interesting part of a financial episode is rarely the crash. It is the long, ordinary stretch beforehand, when everyone involved was behaving reasonably given what they believed, and the moment when what they believed stopped being true.
Editorial
Everything here is written by Marcos Vega. Sources are named in the text where they matter, and supplemental documents are published alongside the essays they support so you can read the evidence rather than take the argument on trust.
Nothing published here is investment advice — see the Terms for the full statement.
Corrections
Errors of fact are corrected in place and noted at the foot of the piece. If you find one, the editor would like to hear about it.