Spaces Podcast

At the dawn of the 20th century, American finance looked modern—telegraphs, syndicates, Wall Street empires—but it had no brakes. In this episode of Built to Divide, host Dimitrius Lynch follows the chain reaction from the Panic of 1907 to the creation of the Federal Reserve, revealing how crises, central banking, and policy choices concentrated power at the top and quietly reshaped who gets to own a home in America.We move from J.P. Morgan locking bankers in his library to stabilize markets, to the secret Jekyll Island meeting that birthed the blueprint for the Fed, to a global financial order built on austerity, gold, and central banks. Lynch unpacks how this shift—from robber barons to central bankers—centralized control over money and credit, setting the stage for a financial system that could either stabilize the economy or supercharge inequality.In parallel, the episode traces a second, brutal story: the clash between slave labor and wage labor, the Civil War, broken promises like Special Field Orders N