How Money Works

How Money WorksHow banks, debt, markets, and personal wealth fit togetherSeries 'In Twelve Evenings',   Book 20Vita HarwoodWhat Do I Already Know About This?Test your knowledge!What happens to money after it reaches a bank account? Why can making a loan create a bank deposit? How is income different from capital? Why can the same £10,000 have very different purchasing power today and twenty years from now? And what really happens after you tap Buy in a brokerage app?Finance: How Money Works brings those questions into one clear system. A hypothetical £10,000 runs through the entire course. Each evening, readers look at it in a different form: cash, a bank deposit, debt, part of a personal balance sheet, a share, a bond, a fund holding, a currency, or a digital asset. The number stays familiar while the legal rights, risks, liquidity, and time horizon change.The book explains:why societies use money and where its value comes from;how commercial banks and central banks work;what simple and compound interest actually do;how inflation changes real purchasing power;liquidity, net worth, cash flow, and financial reserves;how to read the cost and structure of debt;what sits behind an exchange, a broker, clearing, settlement, and custody;how shares, bonds, ETFs, and other funds differ;why volatility is not the same thing as risk;how currencies, Bitcoin, stablecoins, and self-custody fit into the wider financial picture.