The Medici banking family didn't just change finance. They invented the flavor of collapse we're still tasting 600 years later.
We are told we live in a world of unprecedented freedom. Thousands of products, millions of options, infinite scroll. But behind this abundance lies a paradox: the more choices we appear to have, the fewer meaningful decisions remain available to us.
This book traces the architecture of modern fragility to its origins in Renaissance Florence, where a single banking family pioneered techniques of control that persist today. Not through conspiracy, but through something more insidious: the normalization of systems too complex to question and too fragile to survive honest examination.
What the Medici began, we now call "too big to fail." But the real revelation is simpler and more damning: the system isn't too big to fail. It's too fragile to succeed. It requires constant intervention, endless bailouts, perpetual emergency. This isn't a bug. It was designed this way.
Invented double-entry bookkeeping and bills of exchange. Made lending money to monarchs a business model.
Four Medici popes. Spiritual authority merged with financial power. Indulgences as the original subscription model.
Quantitative easing. Bailouts. "Too big to fail." The Medici playbook, now global. Same fragility, larger scale.
A book about how the Medici ghost haunts global finance
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