Brendan Greeley

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

of fiat, as I've said, I'm 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 Mancu at Tulane University in 1995.

It hasn't changed from recent versions of the Mancu textbook.

And the history of money is just kind of glossed over.

It's 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.