Brendan Greeley

That's what led me to spend the same amount of time that you did in the mountains of Bohemia and Saxony looking at these very early capital structures.

But-

The basic point for me of the starting point for the book is we didn't create our own money.

And in fact, America succumbed to an existing global dollar zone.

And once I knew to look for that, I started to see monetary chaos everywhere.

I think monetary sovereignty exists.

I went through an adolescent period where I was like,

there's no such thing as monetary sovereignty.

It's bullshit.

And now what I've started to think is you can win monetary sovereignty over the chaos, but it takes a lot of work and it's constantly slipping out of your grasp and you have to constantly watch where monetary sovereignty is being eroded.

I think that's true right now in the United States.

It's definitely true in 1776.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I think that once we have a history of how the United States claimed sovereignty of its own dollar, we sort of understand that it's not just levitating on its own.

But if we start right now with the global dollar system, what we're taught is that money comes from the Fed, the dollar comes from the Fed, and then the banks take it and play with it.

That doesn't seem to be true.

And in fact, the way we produce almost all of the dollars in the world is that commercial banks, private entities, mark up their own balance sheets with brand new deposits denominated in dollars.

When a bank makes you a loan in America, it just marks up your account with brand new deposits.

They didn't get those from the Fed.

Nobody arrived with a briefcase full of dollars, $100 bills.