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# Was Credit the Earliest Money?

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/taYEKzSo.m3u8" -->
## Video: Was Credit the Earliest Money?

[Watch (HLS stream): Was Credit the Earliest Money?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/taYEKzSo.m3u8) (1:24)

![Was Credit the Earliest Money?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/taYEKzSo/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2016-06-20. Author Kabir Sehgal explains the evolution of money._


---

Jul 27, 2023 8:17 PM UTC

---

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[Love & Money: Myths About Couples and Credit](/video/bxzh8jaw/)

### Love & Money: Myths About Couples and Credit

---


## Transcript

Kabir, welcome. Tell me about the book Coined. Well, I started working at J. P. Morgan just months before the credit crisis, and I was like, what is going on in the world? Why are people losing their jobs, why are people losing their lives in some cases? So I went and I studied the idea of money. What's going on in your brain, what's going on in your mind. When you think about money and it culminated in my book, Coined. So you went to a lot of different countries for the book. So, what differences are there culturally in how people relate to money, talk about money, spend money? Well I started my book in the Galapagos Islands.

Why did I go to the Galapagos to study money? Because really, the first type of money was food, was energy. And really when the brain expanded money became more abstract. It became like a metal, or a token. Shells or something. Yeah, but when you boil it down money still gives us the calories we need to survive. It's not that far away from its evolutionary purpose. And actually the first types of money, if you look back to 4, 000 years ago, it wasn't coins. It wasn't coins, it was actually. Loan instruments. In ancient Mesopotamia, people had loans. And they would denominate loans in silver and barley.

And they would loan out items to each other. And it wasn't until thousands of years later that coins were invented. So actually the first definition of money, if you look at financial history Is that it's credit. It's not coins and gold and silver. [ MUSIC ]

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