Brendan Greeley

They knew way more than we know.

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.

It was like reading an analyst often.

They were really sophisticated.

They really understood how money works.

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.

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 Ledger's 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.

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.