Brendan Greeley

So then I began actually trying to figure out how to structure this book.

I first thought, I'm going to start in 1971.

Nixon closes the gold window.

All of a sudden, you have the dollar aloft on its own without any gold.

How did that work?

And then I realized I had to go back to 1913, the Federal Reserve.

And then I keep going back.

I have a bad habit of falling down rabbit holes.

But I ended up confronting what I now think of as the 1776 problem with the dollar, which is if you assume...

that as you point out, most of us do, most of us were taught to assume that a country is in charge of its own currency.

Then when America claimed political sovereignty,

New country, they should have had their own money.

The 1776 problem is America claims its own political sovereignty, and it adopts as its currency the dollar, which is a Spanish coin made out of Mexican silver with a German name.

That is a problem, but it's also an opportunity.

If you, once you're willing to abandon the assumption of monetary sovereignty and think, okay,

In America, at the very beginning, it was monetary chaos.

They were not creators of a currency.

They were takers of a currency that came in from the outside.

Now, we're sort of starting to pull on a very interesting thread.

What is the actual story of this dollar?