How Money Works: banks, debt, markets, and personal wealth fit together

How Money Works How banks, debt, markets, and personal wealth fit together Series "In Twelve Evenings", Book 20 What Do I Already Know About This? Vita Harwood 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. Across 12 lessons, 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. This is not a trading manual and it does not promise a shortcut to wealth. It teaches readers to take a financial product apart before an impressive return figure pushes every other question aside.