The Almighty Dollar: The Global History Behind America’s Money

About this episode

Brendan Greeley discusses the complex history and future of the dollar, challenging common narratives and exploring its implications on power and sovereignty.

What does the history of the dollar reveal about power, sovereignty, and the way money really works? In this episode of Policy Punchline, Financial Times journalist and Princeton historian Brendan Greeley joins Princeton students Alice McCarthy ’27 and Maddie Feldman ’27 to discuss his forthcoming book, The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money. Greeley challenges the familiar story that the dollar began as an American invention. Instead, he traces its origins through Spanish silver, German mining towns, colonial ledgers, promissory notes, banking panics, and the private systems of credit that long preceded the modern Federal Reserve. The conversation explores why there is no single “dollar,” how different forms of money serve different people, and why monetary sovereignty is often far messier than governments or economists suggest. The discussion then turns to the present: crypto, stablecoins, America’s broken payments infrastructure, and the uncertain future of dollar dominance. Greeley argues that many supposedly new financial innovations are better understood as old banking problems in new packaging, and that the durability of the dollar depends not…

People in this episode

Hosts: Alice McCarthy, Maddie Feldman

Guest: Brendan Greeley

Topics covered

• history of the dollar
• monetary sovereignty
• financial innovations
• crypto
• stablecoins
• banking systems

Keywords

• dollar
• money
• financial history
• sovereignty
• crypto
• stablecoins
• banking
• Federal Reserve

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Financial Times, Princeton University

Books & works: The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money

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