Podcast · Business

Learn Finance 101

by LearnFinance101 · English · Business

Welcome to Learn Finance 101, your go-to podcast for mastering the basics of finance. Whether you're new to personal finance or looking to refine your knowledge, we break down key topics like budgeting, investing, and credit management into simple, actionable insights. Join us weekly to gain the too

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 14 min
Latest: 20 Aug 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

20 Aug 2026 · 17 min

107: The Rise of Passive Investing - How Index Funds Changed Everything (1976–2026) - Ultra-Extended Edition

This is not just another episode - it is an invitation to slow down, settle in, and truly absorb one of the most important, yet often underappreciated, revolutions in the history of finance: the rise of passive investing and the index fund. Today’s story is not about overnight fortunes or catastrophic losses. It is about a simple, almost radical idea that quietly dismantled an entire industry’s business model, saved trillions of dollars for ordinary people, challenged the myth of active-manager genius, and fundamentally changed how capital is allocated across the planet. It is the story of a…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

14 Aug 2026 · 12 min
106: Norway's Ethical Investing Model - The Oil Fund That Invests for the World
This is the story of how a small Nordic nation, blessed with vast North Sea oil reserves, transformed temporary resource wealth into the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, managing over one and a half trillion dollars as of February 2026. Unlike many oil-rich countries that fell victim to the resource curse - boom-bust cycles, corruption, inequality, and economic distortion - Norway built a fund designed to preserve wealth for future generations while adhering to some of the strictest ethical guidelines in finance. It excludes companies involved in tobacco, weapons, coal, and serious…
7 Aug 2026 · 11 min
105: The Sovereign Wealth Fund Era - How Oil States & Asia Are Reshaping Global Capital
In this episode we shift our focus to a quieter but profoundly powerful force that has been reshaping global capital allocation for the past two decades: the rise of sovereign wealth funds. This is the story of how a handful of nation-states—primarily oil-rich Gulf countries and fast-growing Asian economies—have accumulated trillions of dollars in surplus wealth and transformed themselves from passive resource exporters into some of the most influential, long-term investors on the planet. Sovereign wealth funds now manage more than twelve trillion dollars in assets as of February 2026, a sum…
1 Aug 2026 · 16 min
104: The 2022 Crypto Winter & FTX Collapse - From Moonshots to Meltdown
In this episode we turn to one of the most dramatic, psychologically revealing, and culturally resonant episodes in the short but extraordinarily volatile history of cryptocurrency: the 2022 Crypto Winter and the spectacular, almost cinematic collapse of FTX in November 2022.
26 Jul 2026 · 11 min
103: The Emerging AI Bubble - Hype, Valuation, and the Risk of 2026
In this episode we turn our gaze to the present and near future. This is the story of how artificial intelligence—once a niche field of academic research and sci-fi speculation—has exploded into the dominant narrative driving global markets. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI has become the single largest force in stock-market gains. Nvidia, the company at the epicenter, has seen its market capitalization surge from under $1 trillion in early 2023 to over $5 trillion by late 2025, making it the world's most valuable publicly traded company for a time. The “Magnificent 7” stocks -…
20 Jul 2026 · 11 min
102: The COVID-19 Crash - The Pandemic That Shook Global Markets (February-March 2020)
In this episode we turn to the most recent major market shock in our series: the COVID-19 Crash of February and March 2020—a global event unlike any before it, where a non-financial crisis, a deadly virus, brought the world economy to its knees in weeks. This is the story of how an emerging infectious disease, first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, escalated into a pandemic that caused the fastest stock-market crash in history.
14 Jul 2026 · 13 min
101: The Global Financial Crisis - The Housing Bubble That Nearly Broke the World (2007–2009)
The Global Financial Crisis is a pivotal moment in modern economic history, one that reshaped the global financial system and left lasting scars on societies around the world. To create a more in-depth version, let's delve deeper into the origins, mechanics, key players, timeline of events, policy responses, and long-term consequences. We'll explore not just the facts, but the human stories, the systemic failures, and the lessons that still resonate in 2026.
8 Jul 2026 · 16 min
100: The Dot-Com Bubble - When the Internet Became a Mania (1995–2000)
In this episode we turn to one of the most iconic, technologically defining, and psychologically revealing bubbles in modern history: the Dot-Com Bubble of 1995 to 2000. This is the story of how the commercialization of the Internet ignited the greatest speculative frenzy the world had seen since the 1920s. A tidal wave of optimism swept over investors as they poured money into anything with a “.com” in its name.
2 Jul 2026 · 14 min
099: The Japanese Asset Price Bubble - From Miracle to Lost Decades
In this episode we turn to one of the most extraordinary and longest-lasting asset bubbles in modern history: the Japanese Asset Price Bubble of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is the story of how Japan—once the miracle economy of the postwar world, the nation that seemed poised to overtake the United States as the global economic superpower—became trapped in a deflationary spiral that has lasted more than three decades. In the second half of the 1980s, Japanese stock and real-estate prices soared to levels that defied any reasonable measure of value.
26 Jun 2026 · 13 min
098: Black Monday 1987 - The Day the Market Fell Faster Than Ever
In this episode, we move closer to our own time—to October 19, 1987, the day known forever as Black Monday. This is the story of the largest single-day percentage drop in stock-market history: the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points, or 22.6 percent, in a single trading session. No other day in modern financial history - not 1929, not 2008 - saw such a violent one-day collapse. Trillions of dollars in market value vanished in hours. Trading floors descended into chaos; computer screens flashed red; brokers stared in disbelief as orders poured in and prices plunged without pause. The…
20 Jun 2026 · 18 min
097: The Wall Street Crash of 1929 & the Great Depression - The Crash That Changed the World
In this episode we arrive at one of the most infamous and consequential financial catastrophes in modern history: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed in its wake. This is the story of how the Roaring Twenties - an era filled with jazz music drifting from speakeasies, automobiles rolling off assembly lines, radios bringing voices into every living room, skyscrapers rising toward the clouds, and an almost unshakable belief in permanent prosperity - came crashing down in a matter of days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had climbed nearly sixfold over the…
14 Jun 2026 · 16 min
096: Railway Mania – Britain's Great Infrastructure Bubble (1840s)
Today we step into the smoky, clanging, coal-fired world of the 1840s British railway boom — an episode known to history as Railway Mania. This is the story of how a genuinely transformative technology, the steam locomotive, collided with unchecked speculation, easy credit, a national obsession with progress, and a sudden flood of cheap money, creating one of the largest infrastructure bubbles in history.
8 Jun 2026 · 16 min
095: The Twin Bubbles of 1720 - South Sea & Mississippi
In this episode we step forward less than a century to the twin financial catastrophes of 1720: the Mississippi Bubble in France and the South Sea Bubble in Britain. These two events unfolded almost simultaneously, separated only by the English Channel, yet they are profoundly linked by shared ideas, cross-border news flow, and the same underlying desperation: how to refinance crushing national debts left by decades of ruinous war. Both schemes promised to convert fixed-interest government annuities into corporate stock that would pay high dividends from exotic overseas trade. Both ignited…
2 Jun 2026 · 16 min
094: Tulip Mania – The World's First Bubble? (1636–1637)
In this episode we turn our full attention to one single, legendary event that has haunted financial history for nearly four centuries: Tulip Mania, or Tulpenmanie, in the Dutch Republic during the winter of 1636–1637.
26 May 2026 · 20 min
093: The Present and the Future - Digital Dominance, Crypto, AI, and Beyond
The financial exchange landscape of early 2026 looks nothing like the world we left at the end of the 20th century. Total global equity market capitalization sits somewhere between 120 and 130 trillion U.S. dollars according to the most recent World Federation of Exchanges and SIFMA aggregates. The forex market turns over roughly 9.6 trillion dollars per day on average - a number captured in the 2025 BIS Triennial Survey that came out last September and still feels almost surreal when you say it out loud. Cryptocurrency spot and derivatives trading adds hundreds of billions more in daily…
20 May 2026 · 15 min
092: The Reshoring Revolution: Lessons from Frozen Assets
In this episode we will focus on a massive push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., creating jobs, securing supply chains, and rebuilding our industrial base. It's not hype, the Reshoring Initiative's latest data shows trends holding strong into late 2025, with high-tech sectors leading the charge.
14 May 2026 · 7 min
091: De-Globalization: Defence and Aerospace - Armouring Up for a Divided World
In this episode we are going to have honest chat about why defense is one of the purest de-globalization plays, what’s driving the boom, how the big primes and smaller players performed in 2025, the challenges we shouldn’t ignore, and where the opportunities might be heading into 2026 and beyond.
8 May 2026 · 17 min
090: Meme Stock Mayhem: The Wild History of Retail Trading Revolutions
This is going to be a long episode, we're aiming for a comprehensive chat, like sitting around a campfire recounting legends. So grab your coffee, tea, or whatever fuels your curiosity, settle in, and let's rewind the clock. By the end, you'll have a full grasp of how a bunch of internet strangers turned the financial world upside down, and why echoes of that mania still ripple through today's markets.
2 May 2026 · 11 min
089: Options Madness: The 0DTE Trading Craze Sweeping 2026
In this episode we will focus on one trend that's absolutely dominated the trading conversation this year, it's the mania around options, and specifically those zero-days-to-expiration contracts, the 0DTEs.
26 Apr 2026 · 21 min
088: The 20th Century - Booms, Busts, Wars, and the Electronic Dawn
In this episode, we enter the 20th century - the most violent,inventive, and psychologically revealing period in the history of exchanges. Two world wars shut down trading floors. The greatest economic collapse in modern history forces the invention of regulation. Technology moves from shouted open-outcry pits to blinking computer screens. Globalization accelerates, then stumbles through currency crises and dot-com euphoria. And through it all, the same human impulses we saw in Babylonian clay tablets and Amsterdam coffee houses play out on a planetary scale: hope, fear, greed, panic, and…
20 Apr 2026 · 4 min
087: De-Globalization: Industrials, Infrastructure, and Investing Strategies
In this episode let’s have a big, reflective conversation—recapping the series, diving deep into industrials winners, touching on cybersecurity tie-ins, and most importantly, giving you practical strategies for investing in de-globalization going forward.
16 Apr 2026 · 5 min
086: De-Globalization: Energy and Critical Resources - Fuelling Independence
In a de-globalized world, no country wants to be at the mercy of someone else for oil, gas, or the minerals that go into batteries and chips. Int his episode we’re going to have a nice long conversation about why energy independence is core to de-globalization, how policies like IRA extensions are driving it, which stocks and commodities won big in 2025, the concentration risks the IEA keeps warning about, and where the green transition fits in all this.
10 Apr 2026 · 21 min
085: Pre-20th Century - From Ancient Barter to the Dawn of Modern Markets
In this episode we cover everything before the twentieth century - roughly four thousand years of experimentation, from the first scratched forward contracts on Mesopotamian clay all the way to the global telegraph-linked bourses of the late 1890s. No computers. No Bloomberg terminals. No circuit breakers. Just people, pieces of paper (or clay, or parchment), and the eternal tension between trust and temptation.
8 Apr 2026 · 5 min
084: De-Globalization: Semiconductors - Chips at the Centre of the Storm
Today we will focus on semiconductors. These tiny pieces of silicon are literally the brains of everything—phones, cars, AI data centers, weapons systems—and in 2025, they’ve become a national security obsession. Governments are throwing hundreds of billions at bringing production home, and the stock market has noticed.
2 Apr 2026 · 9 min
083: De-Globalization: Investing in a Fragmented World
That whole idea of countries and companies saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t rely on one tiny island for all our chips, or one country for all our manufacturing.” It’s reshoring-bringing stuff back home. Nearshoring - moving it to friendly neighbours like Mexico. Friendshoring—working only with allies. And yeah, sometimes just slapping tariffs on things to make imported stuff more expensive. It’s the opposite of the super-connected world we’ve been living in since the 90s and 2000s.
27 Mar 2026 · 11 min
082: The Great Wealth Transfer: Trillions Shifting Hands – 2026 and Beyond
In this episode we are going to talk about what's happening right now with family wealth. You've probably heard the headlines - the Great Wealth Transfer, trillions of dollars passing from one generation to the next. But today, I want to pull back the curtain and talk about it like it's happening in your living room, because for so many of us, it is.
21 Mar 2026 · 13 min
081: Deeper dive on Toucan Protocol
In this episode we're zeroing in on a platform that's been at the heart of the tokenized carbon credits revolution: Toucan Protocol. If you've been following our recent chats on RWAs and carbon tokenization, you know Toucan's name keeps popping up—it's not just a player; it's basically the infrastructure backbone for bringing real-world carbon credits onto the blockchain.
15 Mar 2026 · 15 min
080: Carbon on the Chain – The Rise of Tokenized Carbon Credits
In this episode we’re zeroing in on one of the most intriguing corners of the real-world asset tokenization boom: tokenized carbon credits. At the end of 2025, the broader RWA tokenization market has just crossed $24 billion in value, but within that, carbon credits have carved out a unique and rapidly evolving niche that blends climate action, blockchain transparency, and speculative finance in ways that are both exciting and, frankly, a little controversial.
9 Mar 2026 · 14 min
079: Unlocking Value: The Tokenization of Real-World Assets
In this episode we're embarking on an in-depth exploration of one of the most transformative trends in finance as we close out 2025: the tokenization of real-world assets, or RWAs. If you've been following the intersection of blockchain, DeFi, and traditional finance, you've likely heard the buzz - tokenization is not just a buzzword; it's reshaping how we own, trade, and invest in everything from real estate to art, bonds, and even carbon credits.
3 Mar 2026 · 13 min
078: Comparing Affirm and Klarna Securitization in 2025
Affirm and Klarna are two leading players in the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) space, both leveraging securitization and forward-flow agreements to fund their lending activities. Securitization involves packaging BNPL loans into asset-backed securities (ABS) or selling receivables to investors, allowing these companies to recycle capital, manage risk, and scale operations. This comparison draws on their 2025 activities, highlighting similarities in funding needs amid expansion and differences in delinquency trends and revenue models.

About Learn Finance 101

Learn Finance 101 is a English business podcast from LearnFinance101. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: LearnFinance101
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 14 min
Latest episode: 20 Aug 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1593423489
Rights: LearnFinance101

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