Brendan Greeley

We actually got places.

We ended up talking, you know, in detail about Martin Luther's silver investments in ways that I think was actually generative for both of us.

No, you very cleverly in the works that we were both discussing and sharing, pick that out as a story thread.

And his family, they were investors in what we might think of as a joint stock company.

The early silver market in Germany explains a lot.

Engels thought that it was the first proto example of what we think of now as capitalism.

the very sophisticated financial organization that pooled capital and sent it down the mine to bring silver back up.

I think that you can, you know, that's a load-bearing structure for a lot of ideas.

Yeah, absolutely.

I started this as a Fed correspondent.

When I started actually pitching this book and thinking about it, I was the US economics editor for the FT, which makes you the Fed correspondent.

And if you're a Fed correspondent, you only talk to macroeconomists.

These are the people who understand the Fed.

These are the people who work within the Fed.

These are the people who run the Fed.

And so you begin to adopt their assumptions as yours.

One of those assumptions is money comes from the Fed.

The Fed produces base money, and then the banks sort of expand the money supply through their own activities.

But the state, this organ of the state, the Federal Reserve, generates the money.

And it doesn't really matter how they generate that money.