Finance stories with consequences attached.
Behind the Money is a reported business podcast built around corporate dramas, market shifts, and policy pressure points. Its episodes turn cases such as Byju’s, private credit, stablecoins, synthetic diamonds, OpenAI deals, and nuclear start-ups into clear financial narratives.
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Behind the Money is a reported business and finance show from the Financial Times, shaped around the question of how financial stories actually develop. It begins with specifics. A delayed filing at Byju’s. A trading-floor detail from Industry. A phone banking app that points toward stablecoins. A jewelry market in Zhengzhou where synthetic diamonds look indistinguishable from mined stones. From there, the show widens the frame until a corporate episode becomes a market story, and a market story becomes a question about power, risk, and incentives. The format is interview-centric, but the interviews function as clean steps in an argument. Episodes often ask what changed, who benefited, who was exposed, and what the numbers reveal once the first burst of enthusiasm fades. That method gives the show unusual range. It can cover private credit products sold through financial advisers, then shift to OpenAI’s computing deals, nuclear start-up valuations, diamond miners, bank deposits, or the behavioural assumptions behind economic models. The register is serious without becoming sealed off from ordinary experience. Coffee purchases, engagement rings, court cases, and television drama all become ways into larger financial systems. Its best moments are explanatory rather than performative. The show is not trying to make markets sound glamorous; it is trying to make them legible. There is also a global instinct running through the episodes, with stories reaching India, China, Botswana, Wall Street, London finance, and the technology sector. The result is polished, brisk, and evidence-led. Behind the Money suits listeners who want business news with narrative structure, clear chronology, and enough skepticism to follow the gap between ambition and reality.
Made for: For listeners who follow business, markets, technology, energy, and global economic power, but prefer reported explanation over trading chatter. It also suits curious non-specialists who want corporate stories translated into plain language without losing the financial detail.
What sets it apart: Behind the Money stands out by starting with a concrete business event and tracing its financial logic outward. The show connects company-level drama to market structure, regulation, courts, consumer behaviour, and global consequences with a disciplined newsroom rhythm.
Behind the Money takes you inside the business and financial stories of the moment with reporting from Financial Times journalists around the world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Reported conversations turn private credit, corporate collapse, commodity disruption, and digital money into clear accounts of incentives and consequences.
Behind the Money follows financial pressure through companies, markets, and the institutions caught between them. Michela Tendera builds episodes around reported conversations that move from a clear question to the machinery underneath it, whether the subject is private credit…
A coffee purchase turns into a bank-deposit turf war; suddenly your receipt feels important.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear, creditor-focused account of how delayed disclosures helped turn Byju's from celebrated startup into cross-border bankruptcy case.
The final Behind the Money episode treats Byju's collapse as a study in what happens when startup confidence meets lender scrutiny. It tracks the delayed accounts, the $1.2 billion loan from US lenders, the default claim tied to a Delaware shell company, and the allegation that…
A clear look at how the wealth channel helped power Blue Owl's private-credit rise.
Blue Owl's rise gets a grounded treatment as Eric Platt, the FT's U.S. investment editor, explains how private credit moved further into the portfolios of wealthy individual investors.
Lab-grown diamonds are reshaping a global industry, from Zhengzhou jewelry stalls to Botswana's strained public finances.
Lab-created stones are putting fresh pressure on the natural diamond trade, and Behind the Money makes that pressure feel concrete. Eleanor Olcott's walk through an eight-story jewelry market in Zhengzhou gives the story its sharpest ground-level detail, with shopkeepers…
A routine phone payment becomes a clear route into crypto's challenge to bank deposits.
Behind the Money starts with the kind of spending that barely registers: a tube ride, a coffee, a Spotify subscription. From there, it opens up the larger possibility that a phone payment could eventually route through crypto, then follows the consequences into stablecoins, bank…
Industry's fictional finance floor is measured against the habits, jargon, and sensitivities of real banks.
Behind the Money treats Industry's Season 4 finale as an entry point into the uneasy overlap between the show's imagined financial world and the real one it draws from.
Practical conversations from the decommissioning front line.
Commodity shocks, traced to market mechanics.
Kentucky tech, explained from the ground up.
Energy transition, explained at system scale.
Nobel laureate Richard Thaler discusses how behavioral economics challenges traditional assumptions of rational human behavior in economics.
Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt discusses the remarkable turnaround of the bookstore chain during the pandemic and the age of Amazon e-books.
Behind the Money is ending.
Private credit has grown into a $2 trillion sector, but FT reporters Eric Platt and Antoine Guerra say the mood has shifted after Fed rate cuts, redemptions, and headlines about Blue Owl, Blackstone, HPS, and Cliffwater.
Lab-grown diamonds from Henan, China are undercutting natural stones so sharply that a three-carat flawless diamond can cost about $57,000 in the U.S.
Behind the Money examines how stablecoins moved from a crypto idea to a U.S.
Behind the Money speaks with Industry co-creators Mickey Down and Conrad Kay, plus FT U.S.
Nobel laureate Richard Thaler discusses how economics often misrepresents human behavior by assuming perfect rationality.
The episode discusses OpenAI's recent massive deals to secure computing power and infrastructure for its AI ambitions.
The FT's US energy editor discusses Oklo, a nuclear start-up with a $25 billion valuation but no revenue, aiming to power AI with new nuclear technology.