Brendan Greeley

One of the fears of a more politicized Federal Reserve is that it will start to attach conditions to these swap lines.

Joseph Schumpeter in his sort of big summary of the history of economic ideas said, you know, we're stuck with a monetary theory of credit, right?

We start with money and then we stack credit on top of it.

He said, what we actually need is a credit theory of money.

We just start to think of money as credit.

I have found recently that I have very little patience for conversations about the philosophy of money.

Because philosophers, honestly, they left us a lot to chew on about money, but I'm not sure that they necessarily understood it the way they practiced it.

So I just spent for my dissertation about a month in the archives at the Bodleian where they keep the John Locke papers.

So I've looked at his personal finances.

He collected every scrap of paper that he got.

He understood where his money was going.

John Locke didn't believe that money began with credit.

He believed that money starts as a coin.

For him, it was silver.

He was probably influenced by the prominence of the silver dollar in the Atlantic economy at the time.

But I got to tell you, David, for a man who believed that money was silver, he certainly used a lot of credit.

That's how he paid for everything.

He had a bookseller.

He had an account with his bookseller.

The bookseller sold his books and in return paid for things for him.