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

21:05Brendan Greeley: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. It 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 Saxon 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.

21:41Brendan Greeley: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.

22:14Brendan Greeley: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. So like little copper coins or something like that? Yeah, little copper coins. 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 whack the whole thing with a hammer.

22:47Brendan Greeley: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. This is partly why the U.S. phased out the penny recently, right?

23:18Brendan 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 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 went straight. A dividend in silver form. A dividend in silver form. What they expected. So this is an early form of a joint stock company.

23:52Brendan Greeley:Friedrich Engels actually believed that this was the origin of the joint stock company. 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 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 Voril as a Trek historian who sort of pulled all of this out of the archives.

24:24Brendan Greeley: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 sacks and silver investors that the miners revolted. Actually, so 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 Saxony. You have this big money, little money problem, right?

24:55Brendan Greeley: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 Joachim's Tal. All these coins come to be referred to as Joachim's Taler, coins from Joachim's Tal. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

25:29Brendan Greeley:It doesn't. So that gets shortened to Taler. And then in Dutch, they also start copying. Sounds like Weisenthaler. Yes. Yes. You were from some Tal. I'm watching Joe's head is exploding in real time. Listen, we should mint Weisenthaler. Yes. See what happens. Yeah, yeah. Tal is German for valley, right? So then you get taller all over Northern Europe. So this then becomes an English dollar. 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.

26:03Brendan Greeley: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 the 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 to do the amalgamation process that actually then turns the silver, turns, you know, ore into silver.

26:35Brendan Greeley: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 Yachimsthaler. So Spain starts creating... Is this why a quarter is two bits?

27:11Yes, that's exactly why.

27:12Brendan Greeley:Yeah. So pieces of eight that we know from pirate movies, right? That's what that was. The pirate movie's piece of eight is named because the Yaakam's taller with the dominant form of silver and Spain had to copy it. So 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 is sort of absorbing all the silver in the world eventually. It all takes the form of this dollar.

27:47Brendan Greeley: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 valuations 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.

28:17Brendan Greeley:So to attract silver, sometimes literally from pirates of the Caribbean into their own ports, because that makes 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 all for rewards and won 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. That was great. That was fantastic.

28:49If I could fast forward a few decades at least. 2026. 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.

29:06Brendan Greeley:Oh, yeah, that's what dads do. Yeah, I know. It's the most dad thing ever. And 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 dollars slash dollars to the silver dollar that became, I guess, dominant in, I want to say, the 1800s? 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.

29:43Brendan Greeley:You've got a Seville dollar, which meant it was minted at very high quality in Seville. You've got what they called a Rix 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. Love dog dollars. 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. He's sort of sitting up and begging. Exactly. So the dog, when Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia wet and exhausted as a teenager, he had in his pocket a few shillings and a dog dollar.

30:21Brendan Greeley:So there were different types of dollars, but it was always very clear what a dollar 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 going to lose it if you don't pay attention to it. But just to finish that thought, the silver dollar that comes from Mexico is current in America as money until the 1850s. 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?

31:05Brendan Greeley:I think just your parents. OK. No, my. Not yours? OK. My dad gives me life lessons, but not silver. Oh, my dad doesn't give me many of those, actually. OK. 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? One thing that happens is you get high quality mints in Mexico City and in Potosí. This is 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 little divots of silver stamped and weighed.

31:48Brendan Greeley:And they circulated as cobs. You could get them in the colonies. 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 hordes in China. So cobs had been showing up in China for the, you know, the Chinese, 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.

32:26Brendan Greeley:They weren't interested in any products other than silver that came from Europe. 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 from China? I'm hearing this for the first time. I'm saying that while writing this book, I anticipated this conversation and I'm so happy you took the bait. All right, keep going. 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, someone will find a box of coins.

33:00Brendan Greeley: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.

33:34Brendan Greeley:It starts to move north from the trading ports in the South. So it's the quality of the midst, to answer your question. It's sort of Spain, empires are hard to manage. It's pretty difficult to 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. Super interesting. You say a dollar has some value because there are assets on the other side of the bank that have value. 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, like that that's sort of nonsense or whatever.

34:13I've come around. I used to believe it. Now 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 U.S. dollar, and you can go look what it is. There's 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.

34:50Isn't it that ability to actually extract some share of the national output of America that is why someone would want to hold dollars? And if the U.S. could no longer produce anything productive, the central bank couldn't uphold that 2 % claim, and then the dollar value.

35:10Brendan Greeley:Yeah, absolutely. But the mechanics and the detail matter. 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. I was 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.

35:49Brendan Greeley:We had MankU at Tulane University in 1995. It hasn't changed from recent versions of the MankU 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 rigor.

36:21Brendan Greeley:Your mortgage is a social convention. and somehow when the subject comes to money, we're back in a dorm room with Joe at two o 'clock in the morning going, who knows, man? I 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's 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.

36:56Brendan Greeley:I think we 100 % agree. Okay, great. But the details of that system, I think we should not be scared of those details. Yeah, okay. 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.

37:28Brendan Greeley: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.

38:02Brendan Greeley:And so what you see over the course of 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. 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. The Constitution says states may not issue bills of credit.

38:35Brendan Greeley:That expressly took money out of the job of the states. I don't think they had to, by the way. We tend to assume that this was a good thing, that they were a 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. I knew it. Rhode Island is just extremely easy. Oh, man. You guys are going to get emails. But 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.

39:09Brendan Greeley:What we did was with the Constitution, we wiped all that clean and we handed it to the banks. I was with a group of historians and we were 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 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. Just going back to the full.

39:38You're like a non-crank hard money guy.

39:41Brendan Greeley:Oh. No, sorry. No, sorry. I don't want. No, I'm a credit money guy. It's all right. I'm a credit money guy. All right. All right. Well, OK. I mean, okay. No, I didn't mean, it was Tracy's turn asking a question, and I threw that. Kind of, but I want to come back to that. I just lobbed that grenade in there. 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.

40:47We'll see you next time.

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43:18or 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, I guess, the impositions that the dollar's role in the global financial system actually put on the central bank, such that we You see headlines where it's like, you know, the Federal Reserve has to provide dollar liquidity for allies.

43:44Brendan 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 Euro dollars are. But once you say, look, anybody can create a dollar. This is the old Hyman Minsky quote. Like anybody can make money. The challenge is getting it accepted. The challenge 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.

44:12Brendan Greeley: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 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 make the point clear.

44:44Brendan Greeley: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 sitting on your balance sheet and you can make your own dollars whole again 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. It affects Americans when the global system collapses.

45:16Brendan Greeley: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 the photographers know that it's coming. And they're like, like, so we've seen it. So I think of that as the Badgett 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. I should just say we're recording this on April 22nd. I don't know what's going to happen with various swap lines.

45:49But I did see another email come out today from the Council on Foreign Relations saying that they have both updated and upgraded their swap lines tracker. So take that as you will.

46:01Brendan Greeley:Wow. I love that map. Okay. But here's like – Okay. I guess what I'm trying to understand is like monetary sovereignty, kind of ambiguous term, dollars. They precede the Fed. I get all that. Sure. You've convinced me, et cetera. But when those other banks or countries are in a panic, they come to our Fed for our dollars. Right. So what is it about the dollars that we create? What is it about American made dollars that seem to be special? If, you know, I would take your point from earlier. It is an incredibly productive economy still. OK, we've got lots of real things in this economy. I also think we've got pretty good bank regulation.

46:41Brendan Greeley:OK, 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 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. 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.

47:29And the reason that American made dollars are pretty good, or maybe a little bit better than other dollars is because they're what?

47:38Brendan Greeley: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 asset in the world to a treasury. Okay. Almost everything that's on the asset side of the Fed's balance sheet is a treasury. And, you know, 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. It'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.

48:09Brendan Greeley: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.

48:45Brendan Greeley: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. 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? 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.

49:23Brendan Greeley: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 bought in. I can hear MMTs right now, just the heads exploding everywhere. But I really believe this. You look at the accounting, it's very clear. The Treasury, the Treasury General account of the Fed, you know, 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.

49:53Brendan Greeley: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, 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.

50:21Brendan Greeley: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 in 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.

50:56Brendan Greeley:And then tax them back in. You know, 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, 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. Right, they just sort of stumbled into it. They knew way more than we know.

51:21Brendan Greeley: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 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 works. 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. 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 complain constantly over the writing of this book.

51:57Brendan Greeley: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. 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 on 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.

52:35Brendan Greeley:And then we sort of know how we I think he had advance notice of the panic of 1837 because he seems to have cashed in. He pulled 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 planner and how he made that financial transition 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.

53:10Brendan Greeley: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. He's 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.

53:38Brendan Greeley: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 Orleans. And then he had to go on a massive road trip and track him down, right? No, unfortunately. Then I'd have a movie script.

54:06Brendan Greeley:I unfortunately do not have a movie script. That would be amazing. Is this what you learn in school when you study to be a historian? No, but do you learn the techniques of archival research? Because I wouldn't know the first thing of how to even find... I mean, these days I would just probably Google or Chad GPT what archival library might have this information. Maybe I'd start my search there or something like that. But when they talk in the academic setting about training to be a historian, are these sort of like the craft of the trade that you learn? Like how do you learn how to identify the library and get to know where in the library to look and which stacks to look into?

54:47Brendan Greeley:So that's a really important question, and the answer is not what you think it is. They do not teach you how to do that. I just assume that's it. You read a lot of secondary literature. You read a lot of theory. You do a lot of historiography. So you'll take a course as a graduate student, and 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 the cliche of some societies where when a child is ready to be an adult, they send them out into the woods. They've got to live on their own, and they've just got to figure it out. Good luck to you, kid.

55:18Brendan Greeley: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. 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 of 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. Wait, but one thing I know about the archives, they don't let you eat in the archives.

55:46Well, not in the archives. Right, okay.

55:47Brendan Greeley:But you have to figure it out on your own. You know, I looked at 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 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 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.

56:15Brendan Greeley: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 decided to be kept. 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 one plantation to another. You can sort of, 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.

56:55Brendan Greeley:So you have to do a lot of that work. 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 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. All right, Brendan Greeley, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts.

57:24The book is the almighty dollar, 500 years of the world's most powerful money. Thank you.

57:42Joe that was a lot of fun it was such a great 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 U.S. 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 it does become an obligation on the United States to support those dollars. And it can become another political tool, but it's still a constraint in many ways.

58:18Okay, so 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. Right. Which I hadn't really thought about that or even like 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 bimetal.

59:04I 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 more more inflationary the farmers wanted 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 thing but I had not quite appreciate like how far that went back yeah the urge to to make dollars is uh 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 it's just so interesting that there was this thing 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 on a CD player.

1:00:05A good user interface and a network effect. And a good, 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. There used to be a great power and blah, blah, blah. And everyone still uses the dollar. The dollar still exists. Yeah, it's pretty good. Totally. It's a good currency. Okay. All right, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. Okay, this has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart.

1:00:37Follow our guest, Brendan Greeley. He's at BH Greeley. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. 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 slash OddLots. 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.

1:01:13All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

1:01:30Thank you.

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