Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar

Summary

Odd Lots Podcast Summary

Episode: Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar

Date: May 28, 2026
Hosts: Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway
Guest: Brendan Greeley, author of "The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money" and contributing editor of The Financial Times

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Overview:

This episode dives deep into the true history of the “dollar,” stretching back 500 years before the existence of the modern United States. Guest Brendan Greeley presents a global, nuanced, and archival view of how the dollar as a concept and as a currency developed—from Bohemian silver mines to the global currency systems of today. The conversation focuses on the origins of the dollar, myths about monetary sovereignty, the reality of multiple “flavors” of dollars, and what actually gives money value.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights:

1. What Is the Dollar, Really? (02:21–06:42)

• Complexity of Modern Dollars: The "dollar" isn’t a singular thing; there are cash dollars, bank dollars, Eurodollars, central bank reserves, and even stablecoins. All trade at par with each other, but are created and regulated differently.
• “Exorbitant Privilege” & Burden: The dollar's global dominance gives the US benefits, but also new forms of dependency and obligations.

“There are all these flavors of dollars that kind of sit outside the US's direct control...if you think about the dollar being both an exorbitant privilege...it's also in many respects a burden.”
— Tracy Alloway, [04:20]

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2. The True 500-Year History of the Dollar (06:42–20:00)

• Origin in Europe, Not America: The US dollar's name and conventions track back to a 16th-century Bohemian silver mine—not American political independence.
• "Ancient Dollar": Alexander Hamilton referred to the “ancient dollar”—already a centuries-old coin standard when America came into being. The currency story is global, with America as a late adopter.
• Global Coinage Flows: The Spanish “piece of eight” (peso), itself modeled after the Bohemian “thaler” (from Joachimsthal), became the dollar standard via global silver flows.

“That’s when I ended up literally at one point at the bottom of a Czech silver mine. Because what we think of as the dollar starts in 1520.”
— Brendan Greeley, [08:52]

“It was already something [Hamilton] knew existed, that he took for granted as 250 years old at the time.”
— Brendan Greeley, [07:50]

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3. The Mechanics of Coinage and Monetary Sovereignty (20:00–30:55)

• Big Money vs. Little Money: Early coins served different purposes—large silver coins for international trade, small copper coins for daily life. Mints preferred large coins for higher profits—a problem that echoes even today.
• Decentralization and Copying: Various European states copied the successful thaler, spawning a family of “dollars,” including the Spanish dollar that ultimately dominates global trade.

“The challenge of big money and little money, I think we still have it today with banks.”
— Brendan Greeley, [21:51]

• From Metals to Paper to Digital: The real story isn’t a simple switch from gold to fiat, but a slow, multi-jurisdictional evolution with overlapping systems.

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4. What Makes the Dollar Valuable? (33:18–39:10)

• More Than Sovereignty or Fiat: The dollar’s value comes from deep economic productivity, regulatory systems, and bank balance sheets—not mere government decree (“fiat”) or blind faith.
• Regulation and the FDIC: Bank regulation—like deposit insurance—has been critical. Before FDIC, hundreds of US banks failed each year; afterward, failure became rare.

“We had several...the great American songbook, country music, barbecue, and a vast pool of federally insured dollars.”
— Brendan Greeley, [15:01]

• “Fiat” Explained: Calling money “fiat” is intellectually lazy; understanding assets, regulations, and institutional frameworks is essential.

“We can understand money. We really can. For almost all of our money sits...on the ledger of a commercial bank. It has value for two reasons. One, the assets...and two, regulation.”
— Brendan Greeley, [14:45]

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5. The Global Eurodollar System & American Obligations (41:52–47:42)

• Eurodollars and Swap Lines: Anyone can manufacture dollar claims (Eurodollars), but not everyone can guarantee their par value. The Fed’s swap lines backstop global liquidity during crises, reflecting America’s responsibility for the wider dollar ecosystem.
• American Banking Uniqueness: A productive economy plus robust regulation and deposit insurance makes American-made dollars superior in a crisis.

“I think far more important than aircraft carriers are swap lines to the dollar...if you're important enough to the Fed, they'll say, ‘You know what? That is a dollar. We're going to make sure that doesn't blow up.’”
— Brendan Greeley, [43:09]

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6. Rethinking MMT and “Taxes Create Money” (47:42–50:00)

• Limits of the MMT Tax Story: The idea that taxes alone confer value on state money is insufficient. Historical systems always had additional structures (e.g., “sinking funds” redeemable for silver) to support value.
• Colonial Money Was Sophisticated: The myth that pre-modern money was unsophisticated is mistaken; historical actors understood finance and credit remarkably well.

“They knew way more than we know...They were really sophisticated. They really understood how money worked.”
— Brendan Greeley, [50:02]

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7. The Joy (and Grit) of Archival Financial History (50:21–56:04)

• Reading Ledgers as History: Ledgers provide concrete, reliable insight into lives and economies lost to time. Anecdotes include tracing a 19th-century New Orleans businessman and uncovering the overlooked financial life of John Locke.

“You can lie in a letter in a way that you cannot lie in a ledger."
— Brendan Greeley, [50:40]

• Archival Grit: Historians must often improvise on methods—archives are unfiltered, sometimes physically risky (post-Katrina moldy bank records), and always selective in what is preserved.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Dollar’s True Roots:
  “Our currency is called the dollar—that is a name that's derived from the German, and it referred to a Spanish coin that came from Bolivian silver or Mexican silver.”
  — Brendan Greeley, [07:09]

• On the Diversity of Dollars:
  “I love that list you guys came up with of all the dollars. I keep trying to list all the dollars I can come up with. I have not completed the list yet.”
  — Brendan Greeley, [14:45]

• On the Fiat Money Myth:
  “Fiat to me is a veil. It just says, it's magic. The state says, poof, that's money.”
  — Brendan Greeley, [14:13]

• On Liquidity Swap Lines:
  “I think the swap lines are the most important diplomacy we do.”
  — Brendan Greeley, [44:18]

• On Reading Old Ledgers:
  “You have less of a reliable narrator problem when you're looking at financial records, because they had to keep them accurately.”
  — Brendan Greeley, [50:32]

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Key Timestamps

• 02:21 – Discussion of what counts as a “dollar”
• 06:42 – Greeley explains the 500-year subtitle and the origins of the dollar
• 20:00 – The thaler, "big money vs. little money," silver flows
• 33:18 – What gives the dollar value: assets, regulation, not “fiat”
• 41:52 – Global Eurodollars, monetary sovereignty, swap lines
• 47:42 – The role of taxes, the limits of MMT’s story
• 50:21 – The historian’s craft: ledgers, archive work revelations
• 56:04 – Wrap-up and reflections

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Final Takeaways

• The “dollar” is a centuries-old global technology, not simply an American post-1776 invention.
• Sovereignty over money is always fraught, incomplete, and shaped by international realities.
• What matters most in a currency’s value is “the furniture under the rug”: banking, regulation, productive assets, and institutional systems, not just government declarations.
• The US dollar’s uniqueness in the global system is rooted in both historical accident and institutional design. Its dominance creates both privileges and responsibilities.
• Reading the real, messy details in ledgers reveals more about money—past and present—than economic theory or political narrative.

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Recommended for: Listeners seeking a global, historically grounded understanding of money, those interested in the architecture of financial systems, and anyone with a taste for the buried details of economic life.

Transcript

[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Brendan Greeley]

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Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.

[Tracy Alloway]

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

[Tracy Alloway]

Joe we enjoy talking about money.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

In all its flavors.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I love money.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, we all love money.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Someone's gonna clip that out.

[Tracy Alloway]

That's it. That's the podcast.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Someone's gonna clip that out. Joe saying I love money. You know, talking about it in particular, having it's good too. Talking about it's nice.

[Tracy Alloway]

Finding it is even better what you

[Joe Weisenthal]

can do with it, where you can allocate it to all very interesting questions, but I have to admit I am a sucker for like a weird, a good old fashioned two in the morning where does money come from? Discussion. You know what I'm saying?

[Tracy Alloway]

I have never been invited to any of your 2am in the morning where does money come from Discussions like which

[Joe Weisenthal]

came first, the Money I love philosophy of money, that sort of history of money where, you know, all that stuff. I It's A great topic.

[Tracy Alloway]

There are a lot of social implications tied up with the idea of money which I think you know, have been explored at various times. But they're always so interesting to me because I think even today if you think about money and if you think about the dollar specifically, you know, we're used to talking about like oh the dollar is doing this, the dollar is doing that. But there's more than one flavor of the dollar. Right. So there's clearly cash at a simplistic level. So the stuff that we keep in our wallets or whatever. There are bank dollars that are created by a bank and live in the bank in which you never tangibly see but you can do a lot of stuff with, if you have them, you

[Joe Weisenthal]

can convert them to cash dollars at a one to one ratio.

[Tracy Alloway]

That's right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

They trade at a one to one ratio to the other dollar, that's the important thing.

[Tracy Alloway]

But there are also things like Euro dollars which you and I will never see being a non foreign depository institution.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And there are at the central bank which is arguably it's is its own thing. Right. There are also stable coins which are dollar also often aspire to trade a one to one ratio to the dollar etc. What is the dollar is a, you know what they. What's an interesting question. So one of the topics that comes up a lot is like the future of the dollar etc.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

We don't talk as much about like well where did it come from in the beginning and like what was like, you know, if we're going to talk about the future of the dollar, don't we need to know how we got here and how the dollar was born and all that stuff that seem to answer before we talk about the future.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yes. And also just in terms of social and political economy terms like who actually controls the dollar. Right. Because there's this idea that it belongs to the US treasury, they control the supply and all of that. But as I just mentioned, there are all these flavors of dollars that kind of sit outside the US's direct control. And so if you think about the dollar being the both an exorbitant privilege of America.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

It's also in many respects a burden. Right?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, so they say. I mean I don't know, it seems pretty good as a, as a currency but I've heard that and it is very interesting to think about like you know, you know there's this interest. I think it was, it was Mark Carney when he was bank of England governor, he gave a Jackson whole speech talking about America's declining role as a share of global GDP and the dollar's increasing role as the currency of trade and this weird mismatch. And there's all this stuff where it's like the central bank, the Fed sets rates based on American conditions and so forth, but then that transmits globally because so many entities use the dollar. We could go on and on.

[Tracy Alloway]

This intro is just going to be a Forrest Gump style list of all the different types of dollars. But no, I mean, we should talk about all the different types of dollars, but also where they all came from and what all their different purpose, what the upsides are for each of them and the downsides. And we do, in fact, have the perfect guest.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yes.

[Tracy Alloway]

Someone who's been one of our colleagues at various places. We're gonna be speaking with Brendan Greeley. He's the author of the new book, the Almighty Dollar. 500 years of the World's Most Powerful Money. And you might have a question immediately about that 500 years subtitle. He's also a contributing editor of the Financial Times, and we're very excited to have him on authlauts. So, Brendan, welcome to the show.

[Brendan Greeley]

Thank you. I've been waiting so long to be the perfect gu.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, did I say you were? I did. I did in fact say I was the perfect guest.

[Brendan Greeley]

I was waiting. I was hoping.

[Tracy Alloway]

I'm sitting here paranoid that I'm not going to say it. And people read into it like, oh, why was this person the person?

[Brendan Greeley]

Run of the mill guest. No, embarrassing.

[Tracy Alloway]

You are truly the perfect guest. Why don't I jump in with that subtitle? So a lot of people are going to see 500 years of the dollar, the world's most powerful currency and most powerful money, and they're going to go, what? What do you mean by 500 years?

[Brendan Greeley]

So this book was a rabbit hole. An editor suggested I write a book about the history of the dollar. And as you know, as a journalist, when somebody asks you to do something, you just say, yeah, I'll figure that out.

[Tracy Alloway]

What's the deadline?

[Brendan Greeley]

Yeah, I've got. I've got a phone. I can call people. And I thought I would start it in 1971. We closed the Gold Window. And then I sort of started unraveling the sweater a little bit, pulling on the thread, and I got to 1913 with the chartering of the Fed. And then you end up with a problem when you chase the history of the dollar back to 1789 or 1776, which is there's this assumption, when we talk about money, of monetary sovereignty. This is just the ability. It's very poorly defined. It's super hand wavy, by the way, monetary sovereignty. But generally it's the ability to the country that a country has to control its own currency. So under that assumption, we had political independence, political sovereignty in 1776 or 1789, however you want to define it, we should have also had monetary sovereignty under the assumptions that we use about money. Unfortunately, we're stuck with this problem, which is that our currency is called the dollar. That is a name that's derived from the German, and it referred to a Spanish coin that came from Bolivian silver or Mexican silver.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Really, I already. I didn't know this.

[Brendan Greeley]

So this is. This is complicated, right? We did not have this moment of sovereignty. We did not have a new country. We did not call our currency the Washington. We called it the dollar, which means we're borrowing something else. We're basing our. We are pegging our currency as Americans at the. At the origin of the country to an existing currency. You know, it's hard for Americans to sort of conceive of how insignificant the colonies were at the founding. And so we didn't have any domestic source of gold. We didn't have any domestic source of silver. We're taking a global currency that's circulating between the Andes and China and through Europe, and sometimes it washes up on the shores of the colonies. We're so desperate to get it that we then peg our currency to this silver coin with a German name that comes from Spain's empire. That's really problematic if you believe in monetary sovereignty and if you believe that the country creates the denominator. So now you have a problem, or at least I had a problem, which is I had to explain what was this coin, why was it universal, why was it called the taller or the dollar? Why was Spain in charge? And why were the colonies powerless to do anything about this coin? Then you end up with a different story. Alexander Hamilton called that coin the ancient dollar. It was already something that he knew existed, that he took for granted as 250 years old at the time. That's when I fell down the rabbit hole. And that's when I ended up literally at one point at the bottom of a Czech silver mine. Because what we think of as the dollar starts in 15, 20. And this ends up being a problem because all of the. The way economists talk about money, there's this break between metal and paper. So it's very difficult to talk about this metal coin. When we live in a paper and digital money world now, I think there's a connection, and I think the moment of transition between that coin and American bank money is really important. The details matter. The coin circulated in America as currency until the 1850s. The silver coin from the Spanish Empire. And so to tell the story of the dollar, what I realized is you cannot tell the story of the country. This is not the story of the Treasury Department or the Fed, or of Alexander Hamilton or of America. This is the story of the currency, which is only sometimes a part of America.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'm already riveted by this. I already have a million questions. Just to back up a little bit or contextualize this, that was just last summer we were at Princeton. You were getting your Ph.D. there, and you invited us to be on a panel, and we actually turned it into a podcast episode where we talked to a few other academics and so forth. And I think the conference, that little mini conference, was about writing the biography of the dollar, which you have. I guess you've done it now.

[Brendan Greeley]

I hope so.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Tell us a little bit about, like, what you've been up to. This is you're getting a PhD. I like. It's so cool. Like one. Sometimes in my mind, I'm like, if I could have done something else, maybe it would have been, go get a history PhD. And you actually did it.

[Brendan Greeley]

I actually did, yeah. So, you know, I got this offer to write the book about the dollar. As a journalist, I said yes. And then I kind of got into trouble because I started doing archival work, and I didn't really feel like I knew how to do archival work. And I started reading a lot of secondary sources, and then I began to have ideas. That's a problem, because when you are a person alone in an office behind your garage with a dog for years, and you start to have kind of dog. Oh, he's.

[Tracy Alloway]

These are the important questions.

[Brendan Greeley]

He's an awful dog. We'll talk about it. He's famous on the Internet.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, really?

[Brendan Greeley]

Yes. An Internet mob made me get a dog because my daughter did something cute. She was begging for a dog. And then I woke up the next morning, and I put it on Twitter. I made the mistake of putting this on Twitter seven years ago. I woke up the next morning, and J.K. rowling.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. Now you have a dog. Oh, my God.

[Brendan Greeley]

Yeah. So the dog's name is J.K. growling. So I'm in this room alone with J.K. growling, the dog sitting on the floor, and I begin to have ideas. The problem is, if you have ideas alone in a room, one of two things is true. You're onto something or you're insane. And I got worried that I didn't know what I was doing. And around the same time, I got invited by Seth Rockman, he's a historian of early America at Brown, to a conference about the history of money. I literally did not know that there were historians who studied money. And I loved what they did. They were reading all the same things that I was reading. They were worried and they were curious about all the same things that I was curious about. They were dealing with the same questions. And I told a bunch of PhDs, this is amazing. I want to go get a PhD in the history of money. And they all said, no, do not do that. That's a terrible idea, as PhDs generally do. But I applied to the program at Princeton because Harold James is there, this legendary financial historian. And I love the way he works because he takes finance seriously. And sometimes it's difficult to study the history of money because it does end up sounding like this 2:00am dorm conversation that frustrates me. I actually don't think money is that hard to understand. It's just finance. And so Harold James takes the finance of money seriously. And I was able to, you know, while I was taking classes there, think about this book and also make myself feel a little more comfortable that the book is, in fact, it rests on solid ground. The people that I found as secondary sources, they are known to other people, right? And I am. This book is written within a tradition of thinking about money as credit and that. But also to your point, like, yeah, it's great. I love going back and getting a PhD.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That sounds cool.

[Brendan Greeley]

There was a moment early on where I was doing a project with another. Another grad student, and they're all in their 20s and I make no sense to them because I was like, 47 when I started it and I had four children and everything about me was a mystery. That a pool going for a while and whether or not I was on Instagram. But one of the graduate students said, can you believe you're doing homework? And I said, I can't believe I get to do homework. This is amazing. I've had jobs. Jobs are the worst.

[Tracy Alloway]

I'm sorry, I've gone down a rabbit hole of just looking at pictures of JK growling. But you're absolutely right, it went viral. There's like Fox News articles about it. Everything. Okay, a serious question now. We're not just going to talk about dogs. Although I did learn from your book that there were in fact dog dollars.

[Brendan Greeley]

Dog dollars?

[Tracy Alloway]

Yes, yes, Netherlands. So, serious question though, like, why does it matter how we think about money? Is it the case that, like, if you, if you think of money as like inevitably this, like fiat currency that's issued by a state, that you're always going to think that the state is about to do something terrible with it, or like something nefarious, versus if you think about it as like a social construct, it implies something different about the world and human behavior. Why does this matter?

[Brendan Greeley]

I get really frustrated with the philosophy of money and I get really frustrated with the phrase fiat or the idea of fiat money. Because fiat to me is a veil. It just says it's magic. The state says, poof, that's money. And they wave their hands, they say fiat. And then you have something and that's money. And how it worked doesn't really matter. I think it really matters how we manufacture money. Banks manufacture our money. The Fed manufactures a different kind of money. I love that list you guys came up with of all the dollars. I keep trying to list all the dollars I can come up with. I have not completed the list yet.

[Tracy Alloway]

I was going to ask you how you mentioned this in the book. Like, how long is your list?

[Brendan Greeley]

I think once, man, I'm going to embarrass myself if I try to recreate it, but I got up to like 15 different kinds of dollars. Wow. You know, you've got money market dollars now. You've got stable coins, Euro dollars. Of course, you know, if you, if you get a check from your employer and you don't have a bank account, you got to go to a check casher. All of a sudden that's a different kind of dollar because it doesn't clear at par. Because you got to do a, take a discount at the check casher. Okay. But my frustration with this idea of fiat is that it robs us of the power of analysis. We can understand money. We really can. For almost all of our money sits, as you guys already pointed out, on the ledger of a commercial bank. It has value for two reasons. One, the assets on the other side of that ledger have value as well. And we can look at them, we can tell, you know, are those good assets, are those bad assets? And the reason we know what the assets are is because America has this 250 year tradition of bank failure. And after every systemic bank failure, we introduced new regulations, new way of reporting what's on the bank ledgers. The idea of a comptroller of the currency Followed the panic of 1837, we slowly figured out how to make sure that banks don't blow up. The FDIC. After the panic of 8 of 1932, you know, I really honestly believe that of the great things that America has produced, it's, you know, the great American songbook, country music, barbecue, and a vast pool of federally insured dollars. We had several. Look at, look at Joe. Yeah, yeah, Joe's on board.

[Tracy Alloway]

We need to put the federally insured dollars on that money.

[Brendan Greeley]

We need an fdic. I need an fdic.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Country music, barbecue and federally insured dollars. That's good.

[Tracy Alloway]

That would be a good name for a song actually.

[Brendan Greeley]

The problem with saying that it's fiat means that we fail to understand how important all these regulations are. Before federally insured deposit, Federal deposit insurance in the 1920s, there are about 200 bank failures a year. After that, there are usually no bank failures a year. And if there are bank failures, we're so surprised by them that it becomes a thing in the financial media that we got to talk about, how did this happen? That used to be normal. Banks used to just fail. And the reason they don't fail and the reason your dollars don't fail is because we have slowly figured out what the best practices are for making sure that banks don't blow up. If we wave our hands and say, doesn't matter, it's fiat, probably comes from the Fed, doesn't really matter. Then we lose the ability to say our dollars have meaning because there's assets on the other side of that balance sheet. We can look at those assets and if we start to deregulate, we run into trouble because all of a sudden we run the risk that our dollars might not have meaning anymore.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Brendan Greeley]

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[Joe Weisenthal]

I want to get into how we can establish why a dollar has value in the first place and the balance sheet liabilities of the bank and so forth. Before we get into that, let's just do a little bit more history. What were the conditions such that in 1791 or whatever, Alexander Hamilton was talking about something called an ancient dollar that was sort of something Spanish and German at the same time. Like, give us. Like give us those 250 years prior to the founding of America, or however many years such that a global dollar had was already long emerging.

[Brendan Greeley]

Let's see if I could do this in a way that I don't run out of time. Okay? The dollar wasn't supposed to be money, okay? There is a story, it is told in histories of the dollar that there was a count in Bohemia, his name was Stefan Schlick. He had a lot of silver. Because he had a lot of silver, his money became global money. None of that is true. I mean, it's all true, but that's not how any of it worked. So Stefan Schlick was account. The problem is he didn't actually hold any of the territory that he claimed in Bohemia. He sort of held it in entirety with all of his cousins and all of his brothers. Somebody discovered silver in this valley in Bohemia. The problem with silver in the ground is that you need a lot of money and a lot of expertise. Takes a lot of capital, even in the 1520s to mine silver. Very complex machines already getting silver out of the ground, draining water out of the mines. And so he realized that just having the silver didn't mean anything. So first thing he did was he said, this is mine. Breathtakingly illegal Then he went over the border to Saxony and he got Saxon mining investors and Saxon miners and they started pulling silver out of the ground. So this is already outside of a long established process of what you do with silver and how it becomes money in the rest of Europe and in the rest of Bohemia. If you found silver, first of all, you had to pay a tax to the king. After that, it had to go to a centralized mint. That mint had an understanding that they had to create money for everybody. So not just big coins for merchants, but the whole range of big and little coins that worked for wholesale purchases and retail purchases. This is really crucial. I think this distinction still exists today, but it definitely existed in early modern Europe, which is that Carlo Cipolla is an Italian historian, wrote this beautiful book where he drew a distinction between big money and little money. Big money are large, high value coins and they're for international trade and merchants and the wealthy. Little money is for low value trade and it's for purchases of meat and bread and labor.

[Tracy Alloway]

So like little copper coins?

[Brendan Greeley]

Yeah, little copper coins. Okay. The challenge of big money and little money, I think we still have it today with banks, is that you're going to love this, Joe. The brassage on small coins is higher. What that means is to make a coin is an industrial process. You've got to put one die on a stump and then the metal goes in the middle and then another die on top of it, and then you whack the whole thing with a hammer. I've seen it done. It's very loud. It's an industrial process. It takes one whack of the hammer to make every coin, whether it's a big coin or a little coin. Which means that per unit of value, the labor costs, the brassage, the production costs are much higher for little coins. So this is a consistent problem throughout the history of coinage. Constant complaints that mints, which are actually private companies, prefer to make the big coins because the profit is high, the margins are better on the big coins, they're smaller on the small coins.

[Tracy Alloway]

This is partly why the US phased out the penny recently, right?

[Brendan Greeley]

Yes, absolutely. What you have then in this Bohemian valley is Saxon investors coming south, Saxon miners coming south, Bohemian count, who doesn't really have a title. And what they do is they start getting silver out of the ground. All of the silver goes into a single form, which is what the Saxon investors would have expected to get. A large silver dividend coin. This was not local money. This was not money for a valley in Bohemia. This was paying back silver Investors, it

[Tracy Alloway]

went straight dividend in silver form.

[Brendan Greeley]

Dividend in silver form, what they expected. So this is an early form of joint stock company. Friedrich Engels actually believed that this was the origin of the joint stock company. These silver mines are just really expensive to get money out of the ground. So Saxon investors would put together in this form and what they got out of this was a big silver coin. It wasn't money, it was a dividend. It was a. It was a stamped pure form of silver. So you have this exception where, because the mine is illegal, what's coming out of it is big, high value silver coins. No pennies, no little money, nothing. Just big money. So all of this work, by the way, I should credit Peter Vorrel as a Czech historian who sort of pulled all of this out of the archives. But what you then end up with is this exceptional circumstance where it's not that there was a lot of silver in the valley, it was a big silver mine. But, you know, it wasn't wildly out of proportion with other silver mines in Europe. It's that it was only producing big coins and it was so hell bent on producing just the big dividend coins for Saxon silver investors that the miners revolted, actually. So they, they struck twice and then they finally sacked the town because. And their chief complaint was that they weren't getting paid in the same quality money that was leaving for sale. You have this big money, little money problem, right? So eventually to make the miners happy, they have to solve this and sort of make sure that they're minting little pennies as well. Anyway, this coin then becomes a standard for trade in the Baltic and you start to see copies of the coin, right? This is in a sovereign story. You create your own money to your own standards. What actually happened is you get little city states and kingdoms all over the Baltic, in northern Germany, creating copies of copies of copies of this original coin from Joachimsthal. All these coins come to be referred to as Jocham's taller coins from Jocham Stall.

[Tracy Alloway]

And then that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

[Brendan Greeley]

It doesn't. So that gets shortened to taller. And then in Dutch they also start. Yes, yes, you were from some time.

[Tracy Alloway]

I'm watching Joe's. Joe's head is exploding in real time.

[Brendan Greeley]

Listen, we should mint Weisenthaler.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yes.

[Brendan Greeley]

See what happens. Yeah, yeah. Tall is German for valley. Right? So then you get taller all over northern Europe. So this then becomes an English dollar. The first. There's a mention of dollar in Shakespeare in the Tempest and again, in the Scottish play, they talk about dollars. It's not in the domestic British currency system of pounds shilling pence. To them. They know exactly what it is. The big silver coin that comes from the Low Countries in exchange for British wool and British cloth. So already this story of sovereignty and this story of the fungibility of money starts to break apart. You've got this coin that's copied again and again. Okay, so the Spanish have silver in what is now Bolivia and Mexico. They figure out this unbelievable brutal regime, the Mita, to, you know, using forced labor to actually get the silver out of the ground. They've got the mercury from somewhere else through the amalgamation process that actually then turns the silver, turns, you know, ore into silver. The thing is, Charles V of Castile, Holy Roman Emperor, lord of all he surveys, has to follow the pattern of silver production that already exists in northern Germany. He's selling his silver into the same silver markets in Antwerp as everybody else, which means that he does not have the sovereign right or the sovereign ability to create his own silver. So they sort of hack an existing coin in the Spanish currency system. The real. If you multiply it by eight, there's a happy accident, which is that it's almost exactly the same weight and size as the Yachim's taller. So Spain starts.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Is this why a quarter is two bits?

[Brendan Greeley]

Yes, that's exactly why. Yeah. So pieces of eight that we know from, from pirate movies, right? That's. That's what that was. The piece of the pirate movies. Piece of eight is named because the Joachims Thaler was the dominant form of silver and Spain had to, had to copy it. So all you have this global flow of silver already. The Spanish in the late 1570s develop a way to send galleons straight from the Mexican coast to Manila. So you've got this flow of silver that's going straight to China. It's going through Seville and into Europe. It's also making its way to China. China's is sort of absorbing all the silver in the world. Eventually it all takes the form of this dollar. In English it's known as the dollar unambiguous. Very clear what it is. So the colonies are also stuck on the edge of this flow. And what you get is actually weird currency devaluations among the colonies. So to get to the Alexander Hamilton point, I think I'm going to wrap this up. I think I maybe did it in seven minutes. You end up with the colonies have got their own forms of shilling based book credits. They're Separate currencies from what the British have. It's not sterling, it's Pennsylvania shillings or Maryland shillings. What starts to happen is they start to devalue their own shillings so to attract silver, sometimes literally from pirates of the Caribbean into their own ports. Because that makes the. If the silver then can buy more in that port, which means the port can attract more silver. This is a problem the British Empire eventually recognizes. But this coin, you see it in newspapers referred to as dollars. People were offer rewards and 1 ads for dollars. Colonies are fighting each other with currency devaluations to try and attract the dollar onto their shores. So this is by far the dominant form of money, not just in the colonies, but globally.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That was great.

[Tracy Alloway]

That was fantastic. If I could fast forward a few decades, at least 20, 26. No, no, no, not that far. I asked this question partly out of personal interest because as Joe knows, for some reason my dad keeps giving me parts of his collection of silver coins.

[Brendan Greeley]

Oh, yeah, that's what dads do.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, I know. It's the most dad thing ever. And every. Every birthday I'm like, thank you for my silver coin. But it's lost some of the surprise value. But anyway, how did we get from the thalers slash dollars to the silver dollar that became, I guess, dominant in, I want to say, the 1800s?

[Brendan Greeley]

It's just a copy. We didn't get to. It's the same thing. So you have copies of copies of copies. Anybody who has silver or can get some through trade is turning them into something that looks like a dollar and is immediately recognized as a dollar. So when you look at colonial legislation, you've got catalogs of different kinds of dollars. You've got a Seville dollar, which meant it was minted. Minted at very high quality. In Seville, you've got what they called a Rick's dollar, which is produced by the Holy Roman Empire. Exact same thing. They were weighted the same way. And then it goes all the way down to, as you mentioned, dog dollars. So there's this Dutch dollar.

[Tracy Alloway]

Dog dollars.

[Brendan Greeley]

Dog dollars. So there's this Dutch dollar with a recumbent lion on the obverse. The recumbent lion, once it gets worn down, looks like a dog begging for scraps.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, he's sort of sitting up and begging.

[Brendan Greeley]

Exactly.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So.

[Brendan Greeley]

So the dog.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Dog.

[Brendan Greeley]

When Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia, wet and exhausted as a teenager, he had in his pocket a few shillings and a dog dollar. So there were different types of dollars, but it was always very clear what a dollar was. It was. So in the 18th century and even into the 19th century. So these silver dollars, again, I'm going to say this again and again, I'm sort of very skeptical of the idea of monetary sovereignty. I think you cannot assume that it happens. It has to be fought for over time. It's always fraught and you're gonna lose it if you don't pay attention to it. Well, but just to finish that thought, the silver dollar that comes from Mexico is current in America as money until the 1850s.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay, this is sort of what I was getting at with the question, but like, how did we get to the point where the silver dollars that we recognize today in the collections that our parents bequeathed to us.

[Brendan Greeley]

I think just your parents.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Don't mind.

[Tracy Alloway]

Not yours. Okay.

[Brendan Greeley]

My dad gives me life lessons, but not silver.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, my dad doesn't give me many of those, actually. Okay. But like the silver dollars become a more dominant form of currency around the world in the 1800s. What are the conditions that allow those dollars to start to replace previous or other existing forms of dollars?

[Brendan Greeley]

One thing that happens is you get high quality mints in Mexico City and in Potosi. This is the, this is the, the mountain where the silver is in what is now Bolivia. And so early on, the Spanish Empire produced what they called cobs. These are just, just little divots of, of silver stamped and weighed and they circulated as cobs. You could get them in the colonies, but there's fraud at the mint. There's a problem with the weight of the silver. And so this is in the man. It's in the early 18th century. The Spanish figure this out, and they make sure that colonial mints are as reliable, are producing coins that are as reliable as the mint at Seville. So now all of a sudden, every piece of silver that leaves those mines is in the form of this dollar. This is when you start to see dollars show up in hoards in China. So cobs had been showing up in China for the, you know, the Chinese again, again, are absorbing all the silver in the world, no matter where it's coming from, is headed for China because it's buying porcelain and silk. This is China. They weren't interested in any products other than silver that came from Europe.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Are you saying that China has a history of not buying things from around the world except accumulating financial assets while the world buys things, things from China? I'm doing the trump. I'm hearing this for the first time.

[Brendan Greeley]

I'm saying that while writing this book, I anticipated this conversation and I'm so happy you Took the bait.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Keep going.

[Brendan Greeley]

So, so now to Tracy's question. What you start to see in China is, you know, not just cobs showing up in hoards, these are, you know, every once in a while during construction, some will find a box of coins that tells us a little bit about what people used at the time. So when you date the coins to the 18th century, you actually start to see these really nice, high quality, round milled coins. And this is when, so the word yuan refers to this coin, yen refers to this coin. The Malaysian ringgit actually means jagged, which refers to the milling on the edge of this coin. This coin becomes a global standard. The Hong Kong dollar is not derived from the American dollar. It's derived from this very specifically shaped and trustworthy piece of silver. In the 18th century that began to circulate not just intercontinentally but domestically within China. It starts to move north from the trading ports in the south. So it's the quality of the mints, to answer your question, sort of Spain Empires are hard to manage. It's very difficult to like figure out how to get silver out of a hole on the ground on the other side of an ocean and then turn it into a high quality coin. Over time they figure this out and as they figure this out, you've got one empire, one silver, one coin. It's going everywhere.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Super interesting. You say a dollar has some value because there are assets on the other side of the bank that have value. You. But like. So first of all, I agree with your premise that this idea that there is some like bright line difference between like fiat versus back money or something, that, the idea like that, that sort of nonsense or whatever, I've come around. I used to believe it. Now I, I think I agree with you. To my mind, if someone asked me why does the dollar have value, I would say it's because we have a central bank that promises this dollar can be redeemed for a basket of goods and services that will only get 2% more expensive every year, that there is this sort of hard assets backing the US dollar and you can go look what it is as everything that's in the CPI or PCE basket and we promise that we're going to keep the ratio so that they only get 2% more expensive every year, we're not going to violate that promise over time. Isn't it that ability to actually extract some share of the natural, of the national output of America, that is why someone would want to hold dollars and like if the US like could no longer produce anything productive the central bank couldn't uphold that 2% claim. And then the dollar value, yeah, absolutely.

[Brendan Greeley]

But the mechanics and the detail matter. Okay, so Argentina also is blessed with natural resources, and yet the details of how it produces money are not working out as well as they are in the United States. So I'm not a big fan of fiat, as I've said. Also not a big fan of the idea of full faith and credit, because that again, just says it doesn't really matter how it works. Eventually the country will back it. Well, how it works is really important. And I think it's important because it allows us to then talk about the mechanics of how the Fed actually works in the story that we all got in our textbooks. I will not profess to know when you guys went to college, but I went back and looked at my textbook. We had Mankiw at Tulane University in 1995. It hasn't changed from recent versions of the Mankiw textbook. And the history of money is just kind of glossed over. There used to be coins and then the paper represented the coins. And then now we've got a central bank and it's fiat and the Central bank produces M0. It's really that simple. And then he says, this drives me crazy. Now, money is just a social convention. Oh, is it, Greg? A social convention? Are we all of a sudden talking about social mores in this economics textbook? Like the bond market is a social convention and yet we analyze it with some, you know, with some rigor. Your mortgage is a social convention. And somehow when the subject comes to money, we're back in a dorm room with Joe at 2:00 in the morning

[Joe Weisenthal]

going, I've come around like, what I'm saying is like, I believe that we might agree. We might agree. I'm saying, like, I think it's sort of like, why does a dollar have a value? Because in the United States there is a lot of productivity of goods and services, and I can redeem them at a fairly stable price from this year to the next. I'll hold dollars for 10 years. And that basket of goods will get more expensive over 10 years. But roughly I'll be able to redeem it again at some point for real physical things.

[Brendan Greeley]

I think we 100% agree.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay, great.

[Brendan Greeley]

But, but the details of that system, I think we, we should, we should not be scared of those details.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, okay.

[Brendan Greeley]

And I think you also run into a problem. You know, I would say this because I'm training as a historian now, but you run into a problem when you think of the Fed as the origin and the protector of dollars, which is that we had dollars in the 19th century before we had a Fed. And they kind of worked. They blew up. Every once in a while, it's better to have a central bank, but it's not as if dollars were completely valueless. And I think historically we run into a problem because we're not precise about what backing is. I think, we think now that backing is just gold or silver. That's not the way they thought about it at the time. There was backing, which are the assets that sit on the other side of this ledger. And then there's redemption, which is, can you redeem it for gold and silver? So when we stopped redeeming financial dollars for gold and silver, the backing didn't go away. All of these assets, which, to your point, are productive assets in the real economy, they still existed. We just got better at managing the system so that we no longer needed the edge case of occasional redemption for gold and silver. And so what you see over the course of, you know, the 19th century history of American banks is slowly, over time, getting better at managing what assets are on the bank's balance sheet. How do we make sure the bank has what we says it has? How do we make sure the bank has the right mix of safe assets and risky assets? That took a while to figure out. You know, America had a unique banking system. There were dollars and shillings produced by colonial governments and then state governments right after the revolution that were wiped clean by the Constitution. Constitution says states may not issue bills of credit that expressly took money out of the job of the states. I don't think they had to, by the way. You know, we, we tend to assume that this was a good thing, that they were disaster, that they were inflationary. Some were, some weren't. Consistently in the colonial period, and then again after the Revolutionary War, the only truly inflationary money was Rhode Island. Rhode island seems to be the reason why we can't have nice things.

[Tracy Alloway]

I knew it.

[Brendan Greeley]

Oh, man, you guys are gonna get emails. But we didn't. We didn't have to end that experiment. It kind of worked. Colonies came up with best practices to make sure why financially that colonial paper money had value. What we did was with the Constitution, we took, we wiped all that clean and we handed it to the banks. I was with a, a group of historians. We're having dinner, and we ended up talking about Hamilton, the play as one does. As one does. And I said I was frustrated because I don't think that we should take it for granted that I, Alexander Hamilton's financial system was the one that had to happen or that it was necessarily the best one for everyone. And one of the historians said, you're literally the only person I know who finds that problematic because of the financial plan.

[Tracy Alloway]

Just going back to the full.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You're like a non crank hard money guy.

[Brendan Greeley]

Oh.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, sorry. No, sorry. I don't want.

[Brendan Greeley]

No, I'm a credit money guy.

[Tracy Alloway]

It's all right.

[Brendan Greeley]

I'm a credit money guy.

[Joe Weisenthal]

All right. All right. Well, okay.

[Brendan Greeley]

Like I. I mean, I.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay, No, I didn't mean. It was Tracy's turn to ask a question and I threw that kind of.

[Brendan Greeley]

But I want to come back to that.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I just lobbed that grenade in there

[Brendan Greeley]

because you and I have the same history of like encountering MMT at the same time and wrestling with it and trying to figure out like, does it make sense? Does it not make sense? And this, where I am right now, is at the end of that long process of wrestling with that. We'll get to that.

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[Tracy Alloway]

to the full faith and credit part of the conversation and the idea of the dollar as both, you know, a source of privilege and at times a potential burden on the US or at least something that can be mismanaged in various ways. Can I ask something that's going on right now? So just bringing it up to 2026. Talk to us about, like, I guess, the impositions that the dollar's role in the global financial system actually put on the central bank such that we see headlines where it's like, you know, so the Federal Reserve has to provide dollar liquidity for allies.

[Brendan Greeley]

So once you let go of the assumption of monetary sovereignty, all of a sudden you understand what Euro dollars are. It's very hard to explain to people what Eurodollars are. But once you say, look, anybody can create a dollar. This is the old Hyman Minsky quote, like, anybody can make money count is getting it accepted. Well, it turns out that over the course of the late 20th century, starting quietly in the 50s, and then it becomes this system, by the 70s, banks in Europe were marking up their own ledgers with dollars. They were just manufacturing dollars the same way American banks do it. You guys know this story. My point is, once you recognize that the banks just do it on their own and the country's trying to catch up, you end up with this system. I think far more important than aircraft carriers are swap lines to the dollar. I don't think that the dollar is a product of Pax Americana. I think it is the product of if you have dollars abroad on your, on your balance sheet and you're not an American bank, you're not subject to American regulation, you're not subject to American charters, we've got no control over you whatsoever. However, in a panic, you guys know this. I just want to, like, make the point clear. The Federal Reserve will step in and swap dollars with your central bank. So your central bank can swap them temporarily for you. So that liquidity is, you know, sitting on your balance sheet. And you, you can make your own dollars whole again with, with $. With American dollars from the Federal Reserve. That to me, doesn't say the Fed is the origin of dollars. That to me says Anybody can create a dollar. And if you're important enough to the Fed, they'll say, you know what it is, a dollar. We're going to make sure that that doesn't blow up. And they always say it for domestic reasons. You know, it affects Americans when the global system collapses. But yeah, I think the swap lines are the most important diplomacy we do. And you can see that at Jackson Hole, like every Jackson Hole. You know that picture they take where the chair of the Fed and then whichever central banker happens to be there, they go for this walk and photographers know that it's coming and they're like, like, so we've seen it. So I think of that as the BADGET pageant, right? Like they're there to prove that they all know each other, the system works, it's stable. And in the next panic, the dollars are coming.

[Tracy Alloway]

I should just say we're recording this on April 22nd. I don't know what's going to happen with various swap lines, but I did see another email come out today from the Council on Foreign Relations saying that they have both updated and up upgraded their swap lines tracker. So take that as you will.

[Brendan Greeley]

Wow, I love that map.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay, but here's like, okay, I guess what I'm trying to understand is like, all right, monetary sovereignty, kind of ambiguous term, dollars, they precede the Fed. I get all that, sure, you've convinced me, etc. But when those other banks or countries are in a panic, they come to our Fed for our dollar, right? So what is it about the dollars that we create? What is it about American made dollars that seem to be special?

[Brendan Greeley]

If, you know, I would take your point from earlier. It is an incredibly productive economy still. Okay, We've got lots of real things in this economy. I also think we've got pretty good bank regulation. I could ask for better, but we've got pretty decent, we've got stable banks. Nobody else has the pool of federally insured dollars that we, we have Europe has got, okay, banking regulation, but they do not share common deposit insurance. We have that. So I think that the combination of a responsible Fed, reasonable financial regulation and a massive productive economy means that yes, of course, the dollars we create here are going to have more meaning.

[Joe Weisenthal]

This is the key. So this is, I think the key thing, which is that what's happening on the most sort of abstract level when there's a swap or something like that, or currency swap is that there is a transaction happening from foreign made dollars to American made dollars. And the reason that American made dollars are pretty good or maybe a little bit better than other dollars is because

[Brendan Greeley]

they're what they sit on, this regulatory regime which was still there despite constant attempts to chip it away. I also think that it's impossible to compare any other ass world to a Treasury.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay?

[Brendan Greeley]

Almost everything that's on the asset side of the Fed's balance sheet is a Treasury and the American economy is productive. And the American federal government is going to continue to have the ability to take in taxes of in bank dollars which then give Treasuries meaning. That's just like there's nothing else comparable to the volume of Treasuries and there's almost nothing else comparable to the security of Treasuries. I don't think the Fed is irrelevant. I don't think America is irrelevant. What I'm pointing out is one of the reasons that the dollar is global is because Americans over the course of the 60s and 70s said, go ahead, make your own dollars abroad, we're not going to stop you. They sort of allowed this system to bloom all over the world. And then, and only then was the Fed made responsible for those dollars. I'm trying to invert the production of money. The economists started at the Fed. It starts everywhere. And I think that central banks, we have central banks because we need them, because banks are so important. We need our own big bank to do a job for us. The original goal, the charter of the bank of England, its original purpose was to carry on the war against France. That's all it was supposed to do. The central bank is just a big bank that does what we need it to do. And so in this case, the Federal Reserve is doing a thing that we think is diplomatically important.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Do you think, Is there anything to the part of the MMT story, in your view, in which taxes help create the demand for a currency and thus give it some element of moneyness?

[Brendan Greeley]

Here's where that falls apart for me. We have so many forms of dollars that we have to be specific about what we're actually taxing and what we're actually spending. And what the United States is actually spending out of the treasury general account is bank dollars. Those dollars were created in commercial banks. They were taxed in or they were, they were bought in. I can hear MMT's right now, just the heads exploding everywhere, but I really believe this. You look at the accounting, it's very clear. The treasury general account of the Fed takes in money through taxes and it takes in money when it sells Treasuries and then it spends it back out into the economy. So it's specifically bank dollars that have meaning. So, yeah, it has meaning that you have to pay your American taxes and American bank dollars. But those bank dollars don't just have meaning because they're taxing in bank dollars. They have meaning for all the other reasons that we've talked about. All the bank regulations, the federal deposit insurance, country music, all of it, like, are what give the dollar value. So I think this idea that you're just. And this, by the way. So people who believe in this theory of money really like to point to colonial monies. So, you know, all. Most of the colonies, eventually all of them had their own forms of paper money, and they did, in fact, print them up, and they did, in fact, tax them back out. However, they also all had a sinking fund, which was basically, it was a promise to take in silver and gold in tolls and port duties at their various ports, and then from time to time, sink those dollars, buy them back with silver and gold. There was a coin sitting on the edge of this. This was true in New York. This is true New Jersey. This is true in Pennsylvania. This is true in Maryland. And so to just say they printed these dollars up and they made sure they were counterfeitable, and they wrote on the back, tis death to counterfeit. That came from the Benjamin Franklin shillings. If I ever get a tattoo, that's the tattoo. And then tax them back in. There's a lot of work being done. And the dominant theory of that among historians is it was given money, it was given value because you had to tax it back in. The problem is you. In order to believe that, you have to ignore the infrastructure that they put in place of the sinking fund to make that money have value. And you have to assume they didn't know what they were doing. This is my frustration with economic history. It often assumes that people in the past didn't know what they were doing with money.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right. They sort of stumbled into it.

[Brendan Greeley]

They knew way more than we know. Like, I've spent a lot of time reading the Maryland gazette from the 18th century. They were talking about discount rates. They were talking about bills of exchange on London. They were talking about you would regularly get the. The value of stock in the bank of England. Like, it was like reading an analyst often. They were really sophisticated. They really understood how money worked.

[Tracy Alloway]

How fun was it to write this book because, you know, we sort of touched on it earlier. But, like, you got to go to all these archives. You got to go in, I think you said, a Czechoslovakian cave or Something I did.

[Brendan Greeley]

I'm going to tell you how much fun it was. And then I'm going to hope that my wife never hears this, because I think I complained constantly over the writing of this book. I love being in archives, and I love being in libraries. And one thing that I learned how to do, that I'm going to do for the rest of my career, is read ledgers as history. And they often get ignored. You know, people like to read letters, but people kept their financial documents. And I think that you actually have less of a reliable narrator problem when you're looking at financial records, because they had to keep them accurately. You can lie in a letter in a way that you cannot lie in a ledger. And so you can read ledgers from the 19th century. I have this sort of full history of the career of a man who moved from New Jersey in the 1830s to New Orleans. And he sold carriages and sort of. We know how money worked because he sold. And then we sort of know how he. I think he had advance notice of the panic of 1837, because he seems to have cashed in, seem to pull a lot of cash out right before the panic. Like, he knew what was going on. And then, you know, and then you can see how he decided that he wanted to be a sugar plant planner and how he made that financial transition. And then exactly how money worked for him. Once he was on a sugar plantation, no cash at all. Everything was on paper. He sold sugar to his Factor. You can read all these documents in New Orleans, the Factor kept a running account with him. If he wanted to buy something in New Orleans, he would write a letter to the Factor, and the Factor would send something back up and just subtract it from his account. He didn't have any physical cash. And when he wanted to do something, actually in St. James Parish, where he was, he would write promissory notes. Those promissory notes would circle. We've got all the signatures on the back. So for me, what I now love to do, weirdly, is read old ledgers, because it's like watching a movie. It's like running the tape back of exactly what somebody did, sometimes hour by hour by hour during their day. When you get a sense of their commercial life, you also get a sense of their life. And you can see these actions they're taking point by point. That, I mean, and there are amazing stories. I chased a story about this guy. He had a promissory note go bad. So we had to take it to a New Orleans notary. And then the notary had to go find the guy who had written the promissory note. It turns out he wasn't at his house anymore because his wife had kicked him out and he was living in a stable. And they tracked him down at the stable. This is all in the notarial records while they're trying to, like. And then it turns out that he eventually stole a horse and left New

[Tracy Alloway]

Orleans, and then he had to go on a massive road trip and track him down, right?

[Brendan Greeley]

No, unfortunately, then that. Then I'd have a movie script. I unfortunately do not have a movie script.

[Tracy Alloway]

That would be amazing. I would. Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Is this what you learn in school, like, when you study to be a historian? No, but do you learn, like, the. The techniques of archival research? Because I wouldn't know the first thing of, like, how to even, like, find. I mean, these days I would just try Google or ChatGPT. What. What archival library might have this information? Maybe I'd start my search there, something like that. But when. When they. When they talk in the academic setting about training to be a historian, are these, like, sort of like the. The. The craft of the trade that you learn? Like, how do you learn how to. I. Library and get to, you know, know where in the library to look and which stacks to look into?

[Brendan Greeley]

So that's a really important question, and the answer is not what you think it is.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay.

[Brendan Greeley]

They do not teach you how to do that.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, I just assume you read a

[Brendan Greeley]

lot of secondary literature, you read a lot of theory, you do a lot of historiography. So, you know, you'll. You'll. You'll take a course as a graduate student, and, and you'll sort of. You'll look at all the different ways that people have seen the same period. The archives. It's a little weird. It's like, you know, the cliche of some societies where, you know, when a child is ready to be an adult, they send them out into the woods, they gotta live on their own, and they just gotta figure it out. Good luck to you, kid. Try to kill a wolf and come home. That's a little bit what it's like in the archives. I kept on asking, like, how do I do this? And they're like, go figure it out.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Really?

[Brendan Greeley]

And so you do kind of figure it out. I have ways of going into the archives now and recording things. I'm much better at it than I used to be. There are a couple things I know. Like, I now always bring food in the bag to the archive, because an archive is often Sort of not near a good source of food. So you have to have some sort of protein bar in your bag.

[Tracy Alloway]

Wait. But one thing I know about the archives, they don't let you eat in the archives,

[Brendan Greeley]

but you have to figure it out on your own. You know, I looked a lot of bank records in New Orleans, and the records of the Citizens bank in New Orleans were literally underwater during Katrina. Jones hall at Tulane University flooded. And so they. They did this amazing thing where very quickly they recovered them, they got them out of the water, and they irradiated them to kill anything. But I've talked to other people who've looked in those. Those archives, and you get sick flipping through them. You feel gross after two days of doing that, because I think there's bad stuff in those pages. Some of the pages are stuck together. So, you know, the archive itself is this living thing, you know, which. And also, there are lots of theories about the. About what gets kept and what doesn't. When you're in an archive, you have this idea that, like, this is the record of what happened. Nope, it's the record of what was

[Joe Weisenthal]

decided to be kept.

[Brendan Greeley]

That's exactly right. And so often, you know, I looked at. I sort of constructed sort of a brief story about an enslaved woman in St. James parish based on some promissory notes that sent her around the parish from. From one plantation to another. You can sort of. You. You have to. Nobody kept those records on purpose so that we could get her story. But it's possible to read. They call it, you know, reading between the archives. So you have to do a lot of that work. I. I really think that. I almost don't want to say it out loud. I think that ledgers are an incredibly underused resource. They give us a picture. I was in London last month, and I found the complete financial records of John Locke. It wasn't this, like, big archival discovery. They're there. They're in the catalog, but nobody looks at them. I can tell you exactly how he paid for everything. And for a man who didn't believe that credit was a good form of money, he sure seemed to use a lot of credit.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right, Brendan Greeley, thank you so much for coming on op lots. The book is the Almighty 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money.

[Brendan Greeley]

Thank you,

[Tracy Alloway]

Joe. That was a lot of fun. That's such a great conversation, obviously. And the book is really, really interesting, and it's full of that, like, archival detail that really comes through. One thing that stood out for me from that Conversation again, it's sort of going back to that point of like the dollar is not fully under the US Government's control. Right. And there are times when there are other entities out there who can create their own dollars, as Brendan was describing, at which point, like, it does become an obligation on the United States to support those dollars and it can become another political tool, but it's still like a constraint in many ways.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay, so, you know, I have, because we've done several episodes, including our series on the history of Euro dollars, like the idea that foreign banks can manufacture dollars that I sort of can understand, but it actually really deepens my understanding of it further to get the idea that, well, actually long before there was a United States, there was the decentralized manufacturing of dollars, which I hadn't really thought about that or even really known about that aspect before, but that dollars is this thing that had decentralized manufacturing for a long time. I guess the one thing that like I had sort of understood, you know. So William Jennings Bryan gave the famous cross of gold speech in which he argued that we should have bimetallist. I think it was a bimetalist or that we should have silver. And I remember there being like, you know, my, my, my understanding of historical monetary is not that strong. But I knew this thing that was like independent mints could like mint silver dollars at times. And because there was a lot of silver, the be more, more inflationary, the farmers wanted it or something like that. So I guess I sort of did know that the product, the literal production of dollars had always been this sort of decentralized. But I had not quite appreciated like how far that went back.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, the urge to, to make dollars is, is inescapably human. I think everyone wants to make their own money in some form or another. Whether it's like just a simple barter system or like a ledger of credit that you keep track of.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It's just so interesting called dollars, you know, I guess it's like a standard, right? Like, it's like it was almost like the dollar was a sort of common standard that anyone could, you know, it's like anyone could make a CD that fits in a CD player.

[Tracy Alloway]

So a good user interface and a network effect and a good.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, it could be that one day like US global hegemony has like long gone and people talk about America is just like this thing in the history books. This used to be a great power and blah, blah, blah, and everyone's still using the dollar.

[Tracy Alloway]

The dollar still exists pretty good. Totally it currency. Okay. All right. Shall we leave it there?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Let's leave it there.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Brendan Greeley. He's at BH Greeley. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks Kale Brooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content grand to bloomberg.com odd lots we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all these topics 24. 7 in our Discord Discord GG oddlots.

[Tracy Alloway]

And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about what money actually is, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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