Brendan Greeley
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Barkeepers kept ledgers.
If you had a tab at a bar, somebody else could buy your tab.
And in doing so, they would pay their debt to you.
We can see this.
We can see this happening on the bar ledgers.
Again, I followed a carriage salesman in New Orleans who sort of moved into the sugar trade.
almost all of his money was not what we would think of as cash.
It was not silver.
It was not gold.
It was just obligations that he had with carriage makers in New Jersey.
And eventually when he became a sugar planter with his sugar factor in New Orleans when he moved up the river to plant sugar.
So the money starts with credit and we can understand it.
It's not magic.
It's finance.
We can understand finance.
It drives me crazy when you talk to macroeconomists about money.
They're such hard-nosed people.
And then the second you start talking about what money is, they're like,
I don't know, man.
It's like a social convention or something.