David McWilliams

And Brendan, as always, it's an absolute pleasure.

And we will see you down in Kilkenny in the first week of November.

Happily.

Yeah, he's very unusual in the tribe of monetary economists out there.

I mean, he evokes far more emotions.

The book is fantastic.

Well, okay.

So Eurodollar, very simply, John, it's called the Eurodollar after the Second World War.

Europe was awash with American servicemen.

And they didn't want to accept payment in dodgy German marks, which had been hyperinflated away, or French francs, or sterling.

They're Americans, so they wanted dollars.

So banks in Europe, John, post-war, late 1940s, early 1950s, had to be able to create dollars.

So when those American servicemen, those American soldiers, GIs, went into a bank in Germany,

are the subsidiary of an American bank in Germany, they had to be able to do their banking in dollars because they didn't want to accept the currencies, in effect, the Mickey Mouse currencies of Europe.

So they required dollars.

So the banks who were subsidiaries of the United States in dollars

Europe simply started to make loans in dollars to these American servicemen.

So if the American servicemen wanted to buy a Cadillac, for example, and they were based in Germany, or they wanted to buy, you know, an Elvis Presley album, or they wanted to buy something, they needed dollar accounts.

No, no.

But you see, you think is after the Second World War, all goods were American because Europe's industry was completely decimated.