Brendan Greeley

It happened again in 2020 during the pandemic when you and I were desperately trying to figure out how to write these books about money.

The Fed didn't generate these dollars.

In fact, it's chasing them down, trying to figure out how to protect them to make sure that they're secure after private banks outside of our own borders created them.

That to me doesn't feel like a story of sovereignty.

It feels like a story where people are creating their own money because they want to and it's because it's useful.

And then we collectively as democracies have to figure out how to make sure that money is safe.

Absolutely.

And when we look at the dollar system domestically in the United States, it started with that chaos as well.

So before the Constitution, individual states printed their own money.

The financial details of that are sort of this too much for this conversation.

But in a way, it doesn't matter because in the Constitution,

The framers decided they did not like the states producing money.

It was lightly inflationary.

It was useful to farmers.

They decided, OK, we're going to give money to the banks.

And so there's this clause in the United States Constitution that says the states may not print bills of credit.

The bill of credit was just sort of a state-printed dollar.

But that doesn't mean that the states can just do without money full stop.

They need to create some domestic source of circulating currency.

Because again, the United States was a taker of foreign silver and gold.