Brendan Greeley

I guess it produced some innovation, but it produced a lot of danger as well.

So Wyoming seems to be doing an interesting job of regulating its stablecoins, but that's one of 50 states.

You know, and we have had in the past a race to the bottom on bank regulation.

We could very easily have another one on crypto regulation.

I just think crypto is not that new.

Like every time I talk to a crypto dude, I'm just like, oh my God, just read a book, any book.

I can recommend some.

It doesn't even have to be mine.

Well, so the petrodollar is in a way a story we tell ourself about why the dollar has value.

So right around in the early 1970s, the United States went off the gold standard.

So this is the last vestige that we might peg the value of money to the value of a precious metal.

Right around the same time, there was this flood of oil coming in, very high-priced oil in 1973, 1974, that was sold in dollars, priced in dollars.

So, one result of this is that it made dollars even more valuable.

And so, the story that we have told ourselves over time is, what supports oil?

the dollar, the value of the dollar, is the fact that oil producers price their barrels of oil in dollars.

They sell them in dollars.

So people need dollars to buy oil.

We remove the gold and replace the oil.

I think this is a very simple reading of that history, and I think that there's a different way to look at it, which is well before the oil crisis of 73, 74, well before the price of oil doubled.

You had, particularly in London, very fluid, liquid, inventive markets in people making up their own dollars abroad.