Brendan Greeley

Not yours?

My dad gives me life lessons, but not silver.

One thing that happens is you get high quality mints in Mexico City and in Potosi.

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.

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 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.

The Chinese, again, are absorbing all the silver in the world, no matter where it's coming from.

It's headed for China because it's buying porcelain and silk.

They weren't interested in any products other than silver that came from Europe.

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

Keep going.