Brendan Greeley

We're so desperate to get it that we then peg our currency to this silver coin with a German name that comes from Spain's empire.

That's really problematic if you believe in monetary sovereignty and if you believe that the country creates the denominator.

So now you have a problem, or at least I had a problem, which is I had to explain what was this coin?

Why was it universal?

Why was it called the taller or the dollar?

Why was Spain in charge?

And why were the colonies powerless to do anything about this coin?

Then you end up with a different story.

Alexander Hamilton called that coin the ancient dollar.

It was already something that he knew existed, that he took for granted as 250 years old at the time.

that's when I fell down the rabbit hole.

And that's when I ended up literally at one point at the bottom of a Czech silver mine.

Because what we think of as the dollar starts in 1520.

And this ends up being a problem because all of the...

The way economists talk about money, there's this break between metal and paper.

So it's very difficult to talk about this metal coin when we live in a paper and digital money world now.

I think there's a connection.

And I think the moment of transition between that coin and American bank money is really important.

The details matter.

The coin circulated in America as currency until the 1850s, the silver coin from the Spanish empire.