Brendan Greeley

It's very poorly defined.

It's super hand-wavy, by the way, monetary sovereignty.

But generally, it's the ability that a country has to control its own currency.

So under that assumption, we had political independence, political sovereignty in 1776, 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.

I didn't know this.

So this is complicated.

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 are pegging our currency as Americans 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.