Brendan Greeley

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 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.

That expressly took money out of the job of the states.

I don't think they had to.

By the way, you know, we said we tend to assume that this was a good thing, that there 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.

I knew it.

Oh, man.

You guys are going to get emails.

But we didn't have to end that experiment.

It kind of worked.