Greeley Traces Dollar Hegemony to 16th-Century Silver Mints

格里利将美元霸权追溯至16世纪银币铸造 美元之所以维持全球主导地位，并非凭借国家权威或法定法令，而是因为数百年来的国内存款保险与去中心化银行信贷构建了无与伦比的流动性网络。 在本期节目中，Brendan Greeley挑战了关于货币主权和法定货币的传统叙事，将美元的起源追溯至500年前的1520年波希米亚银矿开采以及全球流通的西班牙银元（pieces of eight）。对话深入剖析了美元如何历经数个世纪的私人信贷创造、系统性银行破产与监管演进——从早期美洲殖民地纸币到现代欧洲美元及美联储互换额度——逐步演化而来。Greeley批评了现代货币理论（MMT）和过度简化的经济模型，强调美元的价值依托于监管基础设施、联邦存款保险以及真实的银行底层资产，而非单纯的国家法令。 美元并非单一维度的统一实体，而是以现金、商业银行存款、离岸欧洲美元（eurodollar）、央行储备和稳定币等多种形态并存。 (0:00) 美元的诞生早于美国建国，其历史可追溯至500年前波希米亚的塔勒（Thaler）银币和拉美铸造的西班牙银元；建国初期美国没有金银矿，只能将记账单位锚定广泛流通的西班牙“古老美元”。 (7:37) 作者布伦丹·格里利驳斥了所谓美元仅是“毫无支撑的法定货币（fiat）”的简单化观点，指出银行创造的美元价值直接受商业银行资产负债表的资产质量支撑，并依托数百年的监管体系与存款保险维系。 (15:00) 西班牙双柱银元曾是主导欧洲与亚洲贸易的全球货币标准，不仅催生了日元、人民币和林吉特等货币名称，其法定流通地位在美国甚至延续至1850年代。 (30:00) 美联储并非全球美元的唯一创造者，欧洲等海外商业银行创造了庞大的离岸欧洲美元市场，而美联储则在危机期间通过央行流动性互换协议扮演终极流动性后盾。 (40:00)

Financial historian Brendan Greeley argues that the dollar was never an exclusively American creation controlled by the sovereign state, but rather a centuries-old, decentralized credit and trade protocol whose value rests on bank balance sheets and regulatory architecture. The 500-Year Pre-American Origins of the Dollar (20:00) The dollar did not originate in 1776, 1789, or 1913, but in a 1520 silver mining boom in Joachimsthal, Bohemia. Count Stefan Schlick launched a complex, illicit mining operation funded by Saxon investors, minting large silver coins known as Joachimstallers (shortened to tallers) strictly to pay external dividends. Because industrial coin production carried fixed brassage costs regardless of face value, mints prioritized producing high-value silver coins for elite merchants over small-denomination everyday change. This coin tradition spread throughout Northern Europe, entered English literature via Shakespeare, and was adopted by King Charles V of Spain, who matched the taller's weight and silver purity in Spanish eight-real pieces minted in Mexico City and Potosí. Early American Adoption and Fractured Monetary Sovereignty (7:37) When the United States gained independence, it lacked domestic precious metals and adopted an existing international unit of account rather than creating a novel national currency. Alexander Hamilton referred to the circulating Spanish silver coin as the "ancient dollar," and Mexican silver dollars remained official legal tender in the U.S. until the 1850s. Greeley challenges the standard doctrine of monetary sovereignty, noting that the young republic operated on competitive valuations of foreign silver alongside state-chartered bank paper. Furthermore, colonial assemblies did not simply issue fiat paper and tax it back; colonies like New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland backed their paper bills with dedicated sinking funds fueled by gold and silver customs duties. Credit Mechanics Versus the Myth of Fiat Magic (15:00) Greeley rejects textbook depictions of modern currency as mere "fiat" or an arbitrary social convention, viewing money instead as an engineered credit instrument. Rather than drawing value from the state's military force or simple tax enforcement, the modern dollar's purchasing power is anchored in the quality of the assets held on commercial bank balance sheets. In the United States, stability was established through 250 years of trial, error, and panics, which culminated in the creation of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency after the Panic of 1837 and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) following the 1930s banking collapse. The resulting regulatory framework reduced U.S. bank failures from an average of roughly 200 per year in the 1920s to rare exceptions today. Global Eurodollars and the Fed as Liquidity Backstop (40:00) A significant share of world dollars is created outside direct U.S. regulatory oversight. Starting in the 1950s and expanding in the 1970s, European commercial banks began generating dollar deposits on their own balance sheets without intervention from U.S. authorities. Greeley points out that while the U.S. cannot stop foreign banks from generating eurodollars, the Federal Reserve serves as the ultimate arbiter during liquidity crises. Through bilateral central bank swap lines, the Fed decides which offshore dollar networks to backstop with domestic liquidity. Supported by high-volume U.S. Treasuries that are themselves backed by the federal government's capacity to levy taxes on commercial bank deposits, these swap lines operate as a primary mechanism of international financial stabilization. Hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway observe that because the dollar functions like an open, standardized operating protocol sustained by global liquidity networks and user familiarity, its worldwide dominant role could theoretically persist even if American geopolitical and economic supremacy wanes.

《金融时报》特约编辑 Brendan Greeley 提出，美元绝非美国立国后凭空创造的产物，而是一个可追溯至 1520 年欧洲银矿、历经五百年演化的去中心化信用网络；其价值根基并非抽象的“国家法币”神话，而是深植于商业银行的资产负债表、长期的金融监管体系以及美联储的危机流动性兜底。 起源：波希米亚银矿与大额货币演化 (20:00) Greeley 指出，美元的历史起点可回溯到 1520 年波希米亚的 Joachimsthal 银矿。当时 Stefan Schlick 伯爵在缺乏完整产权的情况下，跨国引入萨克森投资人与矿工开采白银，弗里德里希·恩格斯曾将此类早期采矿业视为股份公司的真正起源。在铸币成本（brassage）相同的前提下，铸币厂倾向于制造高利润且用于国际结算的“大额货币”（big money），忽视本地零钱需求，导致矿工因工资货币贬值而爆发两次罢工并洗劫城镇。这种产自山谷的大额银币被简称为 Thaler（在荷兰语中演化为 daalder，英语中成为 dollar），并在莎士比亚的《麦克白》等英国文学中作为羊毛贸易的结算货币被广泛记载。 跨洋流通与美国对古老美元的继承 (7:37) 随着西班牙在墨西哥和玻利维亚发现庞大银矿，为了将白银打入安特卫普等欧洲主流市场，西班牙严格按照 Thaler 的重量与成色标准铸造了著名的“比索”（八里尔银币，即 pieces of eight）。十八世纪初期，西班牙对殖民地造币厂推行均一化的圆边滚花工艺，高信誉的机制银币随即涌入全球，不仅向东流向中国换取丝绸与瓷器（促成了日元 yen 和马来西亚林吉特 ringgit 等货币名称的诞生），也成为美洲殖民地的实际流通骨干。Greeley 强调，北美殖民地由于自身缺乏金银矿产，被迫采取竞争性汇率争夺这些流通银币；1789 年建国时，亚历山大·汉密尔顿直接将这个早已确立 250 年的国际结算标准称为“古老的美元”，而墨西哥银币直到 1850 年代依然是美国的法定货币，这直接打破了主权国家自然掌控单一货币的“货币主权”迷思。 破除法币迷思：信用结构与监管演进 (15:00) Greeley 批评主流经济学教科书将货币退化解释为从商品到纸币、最终变成纯粹“社会契约”的轻率做法，并反对现代货币理论（MMT）认为税收单方面创造货币价值的论调。他主张绝大多数美元本质上是由商业银行通过放贷制造的信用货币，其真实价值取决于银行资产负债表另一侧资产的质量与偿付能力。回溯美国殖民时期，纸币发行普遍依托各港口征收关税以定期回购硬币的“偿债基金”（sinking funds），而非盲目开动印钞机。支撑美国银行美元信誉的并非国家魔法，而是长达 250 年的银行危机教训：1837 年恐慌促成了货币监理署（OCC）的设立，而 1930 年代大萧条催生了联邦存款保险公司（FDIC），使美国年均银行倒闭数量从 1920 年代的约 200 家降至极罕见水平，形成了全球规模独一无二的受保银行存款池。 欧洲美元扩张与美联储的全球救助 (40:00) 引用经济学家明斯基“任何人都能创造货币，关键在于能否被接受”的名言，Greeley 说明了现代离岸美元的生成逻辑。自 1950 至 1970 年代起，欧洲金融机构开始在不受美国直接监管的资产负债表上自行创造欧洲美元（Eurodollars）。美联储并没有垄断美元的制造，其全球金融核心地位体现为流动性的终极兜底者：在金融恐慌期间，美联储通过央行流动性互换协议（swap lines）向合规外国央行注资，确保海外离岸美元能以 1:1 的比率平稳兑换为本土受保美元。Greeley 将央行官员在杰克逊霍尔会议上的走秀戏称为“白芝浩检阅”（Bagehot Pageant），意在向市场展示全球流动性救助的协同承诺；而美联储资产负债表上巨额美国国债的稳固性，则最终锚定在联邦政府直接对境内银行美元进行征税的权力之上。 底层协议效应与超越霸权的货币网络 针对前英国央行行长 Mark Carney 提出的疑问——即美国在全球 GDP 份额下滑与美元全球主导地位持续扩张之间的错配，主持人与 Greeley 总结认为，美元实际上已演变成一种类似开放标准或操作系统的通用网络底层协议。就如同能够被所有播放器读取的光盘格式，美元凭借极其深厚的美国国债流动性、成熟的法律与存款保险结构，以及难以替代的用户习惯，形成了极具黏性的全球网络效应。这种制度性惯性表明，即便在未来的后霸权时代或美国经济相对规模继续收缩的背景下，美元作为全球通用记账和结算工具的主导地位可能仍将长久存续。 本期节目通过五百年的制度长镜重构了美元叙事，论证了货币本质上是依赖深层法律、银行资信与清算网络支撑的信用契约，而非单纯的主权法令。然而，当海外离岸美元体系的规模与复杂性不断超越美国本土司法管辖，美联储作为跨国非正式终极做市商的救助义务，与其国内法定职责之间的制度性张力仍是有待未来检验的核心悬念。

## Background 本期节目由彭博（Bloomberg）于 2026 年 5 月 28 日通过播客平台发布，特邀《金融时报》特约编辑兼金融史学者布伦丹·格里利（Brendan Greeley）担任嘉宾。节目围绕格里利的新书《全能的美元：五百年世界霸权货币史》（The Almighty Dollar）展开，深入探讨了美元远早于美利坚合众国建国的漫长起源、从德语与西班牙银币演化而来的历史脉络，以及现代美元真正的资产背书与购买力来源。 ## TL;DR 格里利颠覆了传统的“国家货币主权”与“法定货币”神话，指出美元的历史可追溯至 16 世纪波希米亚银矿铸造的“塔勒”和横扫全球的西班牙八里尔银元，美联储与美国政府只是这一古老全球货币长河中的一个阶段。他强调货币本质上是被分散“制造”出来的信用工具，无论是本土商业银行存款还是离岸欧洲美元，其购买力根基在于银行资产负债表端的优质资产及历经多次危机摸索出的监管与 FDIC 保险制度，而非抽象的国家命令。对话还通过殖民地纸币的偿债基金机制与现代央行货币互换额度，揭示了货币创造的去中心化本质，并展望了美元凭借无与伦比的网络效应与清算标准、在后霸权时代继续通行的可能性。 ## Atmosphere & style 整场对话在扎实的学术考据与媒体人风趣的自嘲间自如穿梭，主持搭档乔与特蕾西与老同事格里利配合默契，将沉闷的资产负债表与货币演进拆解为一场高潮迭起的智力探险。格里利生动讲述了自己中年跨界读博、在车库与爱犬相伴苦思、深入古代矿井以及在卡特里娜飓风受损档案中“翻找发霉账本探案”的鲜活经历，极具现场感与感染力。听众仿佛置身于一场既有深夜哲学思辨温度、又有硬核微观金融解构的学术沙龙，在一次次戳破教科书神话的犀利交锋中体验到探寻货币本质的纯粹乐趣。 ## Bulletin - `07:20` 美元的历史长达500年且远早于美国建国，其词源发端于1520年波希米亚约阿希姆塔尔（Joachimsthaler）的私矿银币，并由西班牙八里尔银元继承扩展至全球贸易。 - `13:17` 传统“法币”（Fiat）概念被批评为掩盖金融机械运行的遮羞布；现代美元本质上是由商业银行和美联储账簿资产负债表“制造”出来的信用凭证，其底层价值依靠资产端质量而非单纯主权意志。 - `40:00` 离岸欧洲美元是海外银行自发扩表的记账产物，而美联储的“央行流动性互换额度”（Swap Lines）取代了传统的军事霸权叙事，成为维系全球离岸美元体系的终极托底机制。 - `48:00` 针对现代货币理论（MMT）的“税收赋予货币价值”假说，历史与会计表明财政部TGA账户收支的本就是商业银行美元，且殖民地纸币依赖关税金银偿债基金（Sinking Fund）提供底层资产托底。 ## Key takeaways - `00:00` 大众口中的“美元”并非均一实体，而是涵盖纸币、商业银行存款美元、央行准备金、离岸欧洲美元以及加密稳定币等多层次体系，平时依靠平价清算机制维持 1:1 兑换。 - `05:00` 当前国际金融体系存在显著错配：美国占全球 GDP 份额长期趋于下降，但美元在全球贸易与离岸清算中的支配地位却不断固化，造成了美联储国内政策与全球外部性之间的冲突。 - `07:20` “货币主权”概念在建国史中被证伪：美利坚合众国独立后并未创立以国父命名的新货币，而是直接沿用了早已在美洲和全球流通了250年的西班牙“古老美元”。 - `20:00` 美元的命名源自德语“Thaler”，经由荷兰语“Daalder”进入英语；波希米亚施利克伯爵为偿付跨国投资客而违规铸造高面值纯银“大钱”，开创了这种国际清算硬通货的先河。 - `25:00` 西班牙帝国坐拥美洲波托西与墨西哥银矿，但为打入安特卫普白银市场，被迫妥协采用约阿希姆塔勒的重量和成色规格，由此铸就了闻名遐迩的“八里尔银币”（Pieces of Eight）。 - `31:35` 西班牙机制银币通过马尼拉大帆船贸易大量涌入中国以换取瓷器丝绸，其圆形与齿边特征直接塑造了中文“圆”（Yuan）、日元（Yen）以及马来西亚“林吉特”（Ringgit）的命名。 - `36:34` 货币的“背书”（Backing）与“硬币兑换”（Redemption）有本质区别：1971年关闭黄金窗口仅去除了金属兑换机制，但现代美元在银行资产端始终受实体优质信贷与美国国债等生产性资产背书。 - `15:40` 美国之所以能维持稳定且具备全额保险的庞大资金池，是因为经历了250年频繁爆雷的银行业试错史，历次恐慌最终倒逼出了严格的资产负债表审计和联邦存款保险制度（FDIC）。 - `40:00` 欧洲美元市场证明了海曼·明斯基“任何人都能创造货币，难点在于被接受”的论断：海外商业银行自发扩表记账创造美元，国家监管仅是在事后被动追赶与承认。 - `40:00` 在遭遇流动性恐慌时，美联储的中央银行流动性互换额度（Swap Lines）充当了非美银行的最终隐性兜底者，将离岸制造的美元折价兑换回本土合法性美元。 - `45:00` 美国本土美元之所以无法被外币取代，主要源于三大支柱：极具生产力的美国实体经济底座、泛美全额覆盖的 FDIC 存款保险体系，以及全球规模最大且流动性最深的美国国债（美联储底层资产）。 - `48:00` 反驳现代货币理论（MMT）的纯“税收驱动说”：财政部 TGA 账户收缴和支出的实质是私人银行系统制造的银行存款，税收无法凭空将废纸赋予稳定价值。 - `50:00` 北美殖民地纸币体系并未因缺乏主权而普遍恶性通胀（罗德岛除外），关键在于当时政府通过设立以关税金银为储备的偿债基金（Sinking Fund），定期回购并销毁纸币提供信用托底。 - `51:43` 真实的金融运作机制深藏在冰冷的历史账本（Ledger）中：从哲学家洛克频繁使用信用记账，到19世纪庄园完全不依赖现钞、仅以跨种植园期票和经纪商经常账户结算，揭示了信用的悠久历史。 - `57:04` 美元本质上已经演变为一种超越单一主权地缘政治的去中心化“通用技术标准”与网络效应；即便未来美国地缘霸权消退，美元极佳的清算标准惯性仍可能使其在全球长期流通。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 货币的各种“风味”与深夜哲学探讨 对金钱的痴迷是金融讨论中永恒的主题。在节目开场，主持人乔·威森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）毫不避讳地直言“我爱钱”，引来搭档特蕾西·阿洛威（Tracy Alloway）的打趣，调侃肯定有人会把这句话单独剪辑出来做成切片。但除了如何赚钱、持有金钱以及配置资产之外，特蕾西坦言自己骨子里总无法抗拒那种“凌晨两点探讨金钱究竟从何而来”的老派哲学追问。货币的社会属性与制度起源极为繁复，而在当代语境中，大众口中统称的“美元”实际上拥有多种截然不同的形态与层次： 从最直观的钱包纸币，到由商业银行内生创造、平日肉眼不可见却承载绝大多数交易的“银行存款美元”，二者虽然存在物理与虚拟之别，却在平价机制下始终维持 1:1 的兑换比率。此外，还有普通人乃至非外国存贷机构几乎无从接触的“离岸欧洲美元”（Eurodollars）、存放于央行资产负债表之上的准备金（Reserves），以及当下试图通过算法或抵押物锚定 1:1 兑换率的稳定币（Stablecoins）。这些不同形态的美元交织在一起，使得“究竟什么是美元”这一看似基础的问题变得异常复杂。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 美元的多元形态架构 accDescr: 展示从物理现钞到离岸与数字货币的不同美元形态及其关联 subgraph FedSystem ["官方与核心结算体系"] Reserves["央行准备金<br/>(Central Bank Reserves)"] Cash["物理纸币与硬币<br/>(Cash Dollars)"] end subgraph BankingSystem ["商业与离岸银行体系"] BankMoney["银行存款美元<br/>(Bank Deposits)"] Eurodollars["欧洲美元<br/>(Eurodollars / 离岸信用)"] end subgraph ShadowCrypto ["新兴数字体系"] Stablecoins["稳定币<br/>(Stablecoins / 锚定1:1)"] end Cash <-->|"1:1 平价兑付"| BankMoney Reserves ---|"银行间清算底层"| BankMoney BankMoney ---|"跨境离岸流动"| Eurodollars BankMoney -.->|"抵押/储备锚定"| Stablecoins ``` --- ### `05:00` 铸币特权、全球错配与跨越 500 年的追寻 每当市场探讨美元的前景与兴衰时，人们往往容易忽视其历史根源；但若不清楚美元最初是如何诞生的，便无法真正看清它的未来。在传统政治经济学认知中，通常假定美国财政部掌握着印钞权与发行供给，但这套叙事难以解释大量在美联储与财政部直接控制管辖之外运行的“离岸美元”。美元既构成了美国享有的“过度特权”（Exorbitant Privilege），在许多维度上也成了沉重的外部负担。前英国央行行长马克·卡尼（Mark Carney）曾在杰克逊霍尔全球央行年会上指出这种严重错配：美国在全球 GDP 中所占的份额处于长期相对下降趋势，但美元在全球贸易结算中的支配地位却依然不断强化；美联储依据美国本土宏观条件制定利率政策，其紧缩或宽松的涟漪却不由分说地席卷整个国际金融体系。 为了廓清这些纠缠，特蕾西与乔邀请到了老同事、现任《金融时报》（Financial Times）特约编辑兼金融史博士候选人布伦丹·格里利（Brendan Greeley）。格里利带来了他的新书《全能的美元：五百年世界霸权货币史》（*The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money*）。主持人首先就书名中的“五百年”抛出疑问：美利坚合众国建国至今不过两百余年，美元何来五百年历史？ --- ### `07:20` 拆解“货币主权”神话：从波希米亚银矿到北美殖民地 格里利坦言，这本书的创作完全是一个“不断抽丝剥茧、深陷其中”的过程。最初编辑约稿时，作为记者的他心想只要从 1971 年尼克松关闭黄金兑换窗口（关闭黄金窗口）切入，打打电话、查查资料即可交差。然而，当他顺着线索往回拉扯毛衣线头时，先是退到了 1913 年美联储的建立，继而退到了 1776 年独立宣言与 1789 年宪法颁布时期。此时，传统经济学教科书里根深蒂固的“货币主权”（Monetary Sovereignty）假设开始彻底瓦解。所谓货币主权，通常被含糊地定义为一个国家掌控自身法定货币分母与发行规模的能力。按此逻辑，北美殖民地在 1776 年赢得了政治主权，理应同时宣告并确立自身的货币主权。 然而历史的事实极其反讽：新独立的国家并没有发行一种以国父命名的全新货币（比如叫“华盛顿币”），而是沿用了“美元”（Dollar）这个名字。格里利指出： - **名称词源**：“Dollar”一词由德语“Thaler”（塔勒）演变而来，最早发端于 1520 年波希米亚（现捷克境内）约阿希姆塔尔（Joachimsthal）的银矿铸币。 - **现实映射**：在北美建国时期，该词指代的是西班牙帝国依靠墨西哥与玻利维亚波托西银矿铸造的西班牙银元（Piece of Eight / 八里尔银币）。 - **边缘地位**：早期的北美十三州在全球经贸网络中地位极其微不足道，本土既无金矿也无银矿，只能极度渴望地等待那些穿梭于安第斯山脉、欧洲和中国之间的全球白银硬币偶尔冲刷到北美海岸。 - **古老的前身**：美国第一任财政部长亚历山大·汉密尔顿（Alexander Hamilton）在规划国家货币制度时，直接将该流通银币称为“古老的美元”（Ancient Dollar），坦然承认它是一个已经存在了 250 年的成熟既有通货。 格里利为了探寻源头，甚至亲自下潜到了捷克古代银矿的矿井底部。他强调，当代经济学家常常在“金属硬币时代”与“现代纸币/数字信用时代”之间划出一条非黑即白的鸿沟，这种割裂遮蔽了历史的连贯性。现代美国银行信用货币与这枚古老西班牙铸币之间的演进与交接细节，恰恰是理解现代美元本质的真正钥匙。 ### `10:00` 美元的超国家属性与布伦丹的博士求学奇遇 布伦丹·格里利（Brendan Greeley）强调，直到 19 世纪 50 年代，西班牙帝国的银币（Spanish silver dollar）依然作为法定或实际流通货币在美国本土广泛流转。因此，要书写美元的完整历史，绝不能仅仅局限于讲述美利坚合众国自身的故事；这不仅不是财政部、美联储、亚历山大·汉密尔顿（Alexander Hamilton）或美国的专属历史，而是一部关于货币本身的漫长叙事，美国只是其历程中的一个阶段而已。 节目主持人回顾了去年夏天在普林斯顿大学的场景，当时布伦丹正在攻读博士学位，并邀请他们参与了一场探讨“美元传记”的学术研讨会，后来还录制成了一期播客。主持人感叹布伦丹作为一名成熟的记者，竟然真的身体力行去读历史学博士。布伦丹坦承，最初他接下写书的邀约时只是一名记者，但在深入档案馆查阅史料后，他发现自己并不具备扎实的专业档案研究训练。随着研读大量二手文献，各种各样的理论构想开始在脑海中涌现。他打趣道，一个中年男人长年把自己关在车库后面的独立办公室里，唯一相伴的只有一条狗，此时一旦产生新奇的想法，后果往往非同小可——要么是发现了学术新大陆，要么就是整个人疯掉了。 话题随后逗趣地转向了他的狗。布伦丹解释，那是一只网络名犬，名字叫“J.K. 咆哮”（J.K. Growling）。七年前，他的女儿为了求得一只宠物狗做了些可爱的小举动，布伦丹随手发在 Twitter 上，结果引发全网病毒式传播，甚至连 J.K. 罗琳（J.K. Rowling）本人都参与互动，连福克斯新闻（Fox News）都对此进行了报道。于是在网络舆论的“逼迫”下，他养了这只狗。 当布伦丹一个人与狗共处、陷入对货币理论的自我怀疑时，布朗大学早期美国史学家塞思·罗克曼（Seth Rockman）邀请他参加了一场关于货币史的学术研讨会。布伦丹惊讶地发现，原来学术界真的有一批学者在专职研究货币，并且他们阅读的文献、担忧的困惑、好奇的问题与自己完全一致。当布伦丹兴奋地向学者们表示想读博时，大家纷纷以过来人的口吻劝阻：“千万别去，这是个糟糕透顶的主意！”但他最终还是申请并进入了普林斯顿大学，因为那里有传奇金融史学家哈罗德·詹姆斯（Harold James）。布伦丹极其赞赏哈罗德·詹姆斯的治学方式——严肃认真地对待“金融学本身”，而不是将货币讨论沦为大学宿舍里凌晨两点毫无实质内容的哲学空谈。此外，布伦丹以 47 岁、带着四个孩子的“大叔”身份回到大学，与二十出头的年轻研究生们一同上课。同级生曾惊讶地问他：“你敢相信你居然还要做家庭作业吗？”布伦丹却兴奋地回答：“我敢相信我‘竟然能够’做作业！这太棒了！以往的工作才是最糟糕的经历！” ### `13:17` 摒弃“法币”虚妄概念：货币的资产负债表与制造本质 主持人由此引出一个严肃的理论问题：我们如何看待货币真的重要吗？如果把货币单纯视作由国家发行的法币（Fiat Currency），是否必然会导致人们时刻担心国家滥用权力做坏事？而如果将其视为一种社会契约或社会建构，是否又意味着对人类行为的不同理解？ 布伦丹对所谓的“货币哲学”以及“法币”（Fiat）这一词汇表达了强烈的反感。他指出，“Fiat”（意为“命令/神谕”，如“要有光”）在货币讨论中更像是一层遮羞布或烟幕弹： - 它诱导人们相信货币的产生如同变戏法，仿佛只要国家挥挥手宣布“这就是钱”，货币便凭空出现了，进而让人放弃去追究其背后的底层运作机制。 - 事实上，货币是被“制造”（manufactured）出来的：商业银行制造了一种货币（存款货币），美联储则制造了另一种货币（储备货币）。 - 这种机制意味着货币是有扎实分析维度的，不能用一句神秘主义的“法币”草草带过。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 货币的生成与清算逻辑 accDescr: 对比商业银行资产负债表创造的存款与美联储制造的储备货币，以及破产监管的演进。 subgraph Mfg ["货币制造体系"] CB["美联储 / 央行"] -->|发行| FedMoney["储备货币 / 基础货币"] ComB["商业银行"] -->|资产端配置资产| Ledger["银行账簿 (Ledger)"] Ledger -->|负债端创造| BankMoney["银行存款美元"] end subgraph Variety ["各种各样的美元形态"] BankMoney --> MM["货币市场基金美元"] BankMoney --> ED["欧洲美元 (Eurodollar)"] BankMoney --> SC["稳定币 (Stablecoins)"] BankMoney --> CC["支票兑现所贴现美元"] end subgraph Backing ["价值支撑与防爆机制"] Ledger -.->|对应优质资产| Assets["优质信贷资产与国债"] Assets -.->|历次危机倒逼监管| Reg["监管报告与 FDIC 保险制度"] end ``` 谈及美元的多元形态，布伦丹表示自己曾在书中试图梳理市面上的美元种类，甚至一口气列出了多达 15 种，包括货币市场美元（Money Market Dollars）、欧洲美元（Eurodollars）、加密稳定币（Stablecoins）等。他举例说明，如果一个没有银行账户的工人拿到雇主发放的发薪支票，不得不去街头的支票兑现所（Check Cashier）兑现，由于必须承担折价扣费（Discount），这笔钱在现实中就变成了无法按面值等额清算（Clear at Par）的“另一种美元”。布伦丹强调，几乎所有的现代美元都记录在商业银行的账簿（Ledger）之上，其价值根基在于资产负债表另一侧的资产质量，这才是美元具备购买力的真实秘密。 ### `15:40` 银行业的试错史：从频繁暴雷到联邦存款保险（FDIC） 布伦丹进一步指出，美国之所以能够确切看清银行账簿上的资产是好是坏，完全是因为美国有着长达 250 年的银行倒闭惨痛历史。每经历一次系统性银行业危机，体制就会被迫演化出全新的监管手段与透明报告机制： - 1837 年大恐慌（Panic of 1837）之后，推动建立了对银行账簿更严格的清查制度以及货币主计长（Comptroller of the Currency）理念的萌芽； - 1932 年大恐慌（Panic of 1932）之后，联邦政府建立了联邦存款保险公司（FDIC）。 布伦丹风趣地宣称，如果要盘点美利坚合众国历史上最伟大的创造，那一定是这四样：“伟大的美国金曲名录（Great American Songbook）、乡村音乐（Country Music）、美式烤肉（Barbecue），以及一巨池享有联邦全额保险的美元（Federally Insured Dollars）。” 这一幽默的论点引发了主持人乔·魏森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）的强烈共鸣，笑称应该把这几句话印在马克杯上，甚至写成一首乡村歌曲。布伦丹用历史数据展现了监管的决定性意义： - 在 20 世纪 20 年代联邦存款保险制度建立之前，全美平均每年有大约 200 家银行倒闭，银行暴雷是当时的日常家常便饭； - FDIC 建立之后，现代美国通常一年内没有一家银行倒闭；偶尔有一两家银行破产，就会瞬间成为财经媒体争相挖掘的头条大新闻。 布伦丹总结道，如果人们继续盲目使用“法币”概念，挥挥手认为“这只是美联储印出来的废纸代码，细节不重要”，就会丧失理解监管价值的能力。美元之所以保持稳定，是因为银行资产端存在实实在在的资产，且百年来摸索出了一套最佳实践防止银行破产；一旦盲目推进去监管化（Deregulate），银行资产质量失控，人们钱包里的美元将再次面临失去实质意义的致命风险。 ### `20:00` 波希米亚银矿与“大额货币”的非法诞生 在探讨美元价值来源与银行资产负债表等现代金融机制之前，主持人希望理清更早期的历史背景：为何在 1791 年亚历山大·汉密尔顿（Alexander Hamilton）谈论货币时，会提到一种既带有西班牙色彩、又融合了德国渊源的“古老美元”（ancient dollar）？布兰登·格里利（Brendan Greeley）用约 250 年的跨度，梳理了全球化“美元”在美利坚合众国成立前是如何萌芽的。 格里利首先打破了一个流传甚广的神话。传统历史常叙述波希米亚有一位名叫斯蒂芬·施利克（Stefan Schlick）的伯爵，因坐拥大量白银，其发行的货币顺理成章地变成了世界货币。然而，真实情况远比这复杂且充满法律漏洞：施利克并无权独占波希米亚这片土地，而是与其兄弟堂亲共有。在 1520 年代，开采地底白银需要庞大的资本、昂贵的机械设备以及复杂的排水技术，单凭占有矿脉毫无意义。于是，施利克采取了极为出格的非法手段——私自宣称矿权归己，随后跨越边境拉来萨克森（Saxon）的投资者与专业矿工合作采银。 这套操作完全颠覆了早期欧洲的官方铸币规范。通常情况下，开采白银必须先向国王缴税，再将银料交送受管制的中央铸币厂。铸币厂有责任兼顾社会各层面的需求，铸造高面值与小面值的全套货币。格里利借用意大利经济史学家卡洛·奇波拉（Carlo Cipolla）的经典论述，指出了“大钱”（big money）与“小钱”（little money）的根本区别：大钱用于商人跨国批发贸易与富豪财富流转；小钱（多为铜币）则服务于平民购买面包、肉类和支付工资等日常零售交易。 从工业成本来看，制造一枚大硬币或小硬币都需要金属坯饼置于上下两副冲模之间，再由铁锤重击成型。由于每次敲击的工序与人工耗费相同，小面额硬币单位价值所承担的铸造费（brassage）显著偏高，导致私营铸币厂始终倾向于只铸造利润更高的大币，而极力回避小钱（这与现代美国考虑停发一分钱硬币的逻辑如出一辙）。在施利克的非法私矿里，这一矛盾被推向了极致：开采出来的白银全被铸造成均一的大型银币，以纯银“实物分红”形式直接偿付萨克森投资客。弗里德里希·恩格斯曾将这类高资本采矿合作视作股份公司的雏形。然而，由于没有小币用于本土流通，矿工无法用开采出的优质白银获得报酬，愤怒的矿工先后发动两次罢工并最终洗劫了城镇，迫使管理者不得不增铸小币以平息民愤。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 波希米亚私矿银币的运作与流动机制 accDescr: 展示萨克森资本与波希米亚私矿结合，绕过王室税收，将白银制成大额分红币并流向波罗的海贸易网的流程 subgraph Capital ["资本与生产环节"] A["萨克森投资者与技术矿工"] --> B["波希米亚非法银矿 (约1520年代)"] B --> C["高开采成本：机械排水与重资本投入"] end subgraph Minting ["非传统铸造特征"] C --> D["规避王室重税与中央铸币厂监管"] D --> E["单一形式：高面额'大钱' (Big Money)"] E --> F["非本地流通币，实为投资者白银分红"] end subgraph Impact ["社会矛盾与市场扩散"] F --> G["缺乏零钱日常结算，引发矿工罢工暴动"] F --> H["成色标准统一，进入波罗的海跨国贸易网"] end ``` --- ### `25:00` 从约阿希姆塔勒到西班牙八里尔银元：美元的全球化浪潮 这类产自约阿希姆谷（Joachimsthal）的大型分红银币，迅速成为波罗的海地区最受认可的贸易硬通货。沿岸的城邦和王国纷纷按此标准克隆铸造，并将这种源自“谷地”的硬币统称为约阿希姆塔勒（Joachimsthaler）。由于发音拗口，它在德语中被简称为塔勒（Thaler/Taler，德语 Tal 意为山谷），随后传入荷兰语演变为 Daalder，最终进入英语变成 Dollar（莎士比亚在《麦克白》和《暴风雨》中均提及过 dollar，当时英国人非常清楚这代表从低地国家换取英国羊毛和布匹的大银币）。 面对北方已成气候的白银市场，查理五世统治下的西班牙帝国即使坐拥墨西哥和波托西的银山、并借助水银汞齐化法与残酷的米塔（Mita）强迫劳役体制榨取了天文数字的白银，也无法打破市场既有的度量衡标准。为了在安特卫普等核心白银市场顺畅脱手，西班牙被迫对其货币体系动刀：将原本的里尔（real）面值乘以八，凑巧制造出与约阿希姆塔勒在重量与尺寸上几乎一模一样的硬币——即闻名遐迩的“八里尔银币”（Pieces of Eight，亦是西方流行文化中海盗宝藏的代表，日后“两角五分硬币称为 two bits”的俚语正源于此八等分概念）。 随着 16 世纪 70 年代末马尼拉大帆船航线的开辟，西班牙银元开启了前所未有的全球大循环：白银从美洲西海岸直航马尼拉，或经由塞维利亚运入欧洲，最终大量被对白银有巨大吸纳力的明清中国吸收。身处这股全球白银流动边缘的北美殖民地，也完全受制于这枚硬币。北美各殖民地虽使用以先令为记账单位的账面信用（如宾夕法尼亚先令、马里兰先令），但其本身并不具备真正的英镑硬币，为了从加勒比海盗或海外商人手中争夺流通现银，各殖民地竞相主动贬值自己的先令，以诱使大银币靠岸。当时的报纸广告与悬赏令上，四处充斥着对“Dollar”的明码标价。格里利由此总结，后来的“银元”本质上只是这套跨国通货标准的代代复刻，它先于美联储、甚至先于美国独立建国数百年，便早已成为全球事实上的硬通货基准。 - **语言演变脉络**：Joachimsthaler（约阿希姆塔勒） $\rightarrow$ Thaler（塔勒） $\rightarrow$ Daalder（荷兰元） $\rightarrow$ Dollar（美元）。 - **八里尔银币的锚定**：西班牙帝国并非随心所欲制定规格，而是为了满足安特卫普市场需求，将 8 里尔折算为一枚同等尺寸成色的大银元，成为现代“两角五分（two bits）”称谓的源头。 - **北美殖民地的汇率博弈**：北美殖民地内部缺乏硬通货，不同地区通过竞争性贬值各自的账面先令（Book Credits），抬高白银购买力，以吸纳全球流通的塞维利亚银元（Seville Dollar）或帝国雷克斯塔勒（Rix-dollar）。 ### `30:00` 狗元、墨西哥银元与早期货币的混乱版图 神圣罗马帝国的塔勒（Thaler）与西班牙的银币有着完全相同的称重标准，而在这套庞杂的货币谱系中，甚至还包括流传甚广的“狗元”（Dog dollars）。所谓的狗元，原本是一种荷兰银元，正面铸有一只趴卧的狮子（recumbent lion）。但随着钱币在市面流通日久、磨损严重，那只本该威严的狮子看起来就像一只摇尾乞怜、讨要残羹剩饭的狗——前爪抬起像是在“作揖乞讨”。本杰明·富兰克林当年十几岁初抵费城时，浑身湿透、精疲力竭，兜里揣着用来开启新人生的，就只有几枚先令和这样一枚狗元。当时市场上充斥着各式各样的“元”，但商人和公众心中对什么才算合格的银元始终有着极其明确的标准。 这种来自墨西哥的西班牙银元不仅在 18 世纪横行天下，甚至直到 1850 年代在美国都一直是法定流通货币。布伦丹·格里利（Brendan Greeley）强调，他向来对所谓的“货币主权”（monetary sovereignty）假设持极度怀疑态度；货币主权绝非自然而然形成的天赋权力，而是必须在历史进程中反复争夺、时刻捍卫的脆弱产物。一旦一个政权稍有松懈，它就可能失去对本国流通货币的控制权。 - **狗元（Dog Dollar）的外观演变**：硬币正面原本威严的趴卧雄狮磨损后，形同蹲坐乞食的宠物犬，因此得名。 - **历史人物见证**：青年本杰明·富兰克林身无分文闯荡费城时的口袋资产，正是几枚英国先令和一枚荷兰狗元。 - **流通期限**：墨西哥铸造的银元直到 1850 年代仍在美国境内作为合法货币广泛流通。 --- ### `31:35` 机器制造与白银黑洞：西班牙银币如何塑造亚洲货币名称 在 1800 年代，西班牙银元之所以能逐步淘汰其他形态的货币，成为统治全球的绝对硬通货，核心在于造币技术的飞跃。早期西班牙帝国在造币重镇（墨西哥城以及位于今玻利维亚波托西的银山）生产的货币被称为“cobs”（即原铸银块）。这些银块只是将银块称重后粗暴地砸上印戳，不仅形状极其不规则，而且容易发生造币厂贪腐舞弊、成色分量不足等严重问题。直到 18 世纪初，西班牙王室彻底整肃了造币厂，引入边缘滚齿（milled edge）的机器冲压技术，使殖民地造币厂生产的银币在精密度和防伪度上与塞维利亚本土造币厂毫无二致。 几乎在同一时间，这种高品质的机制银币开始像潮水般涌入中国。当时的中国对欧洲制造的工业品毫无兴趣，却是一个巨大的“白银吸收黑洞”——西方为了换取中国的丝绸和瓷器，不得不将从美洲地底挖出的白银源源不断地运往东方。随着地下考古发掘出的大量 18 世纪窖藏钱币，高品质、边缘带齿的圆形机制银币取代了早期的粗糙银块，并彻底重塑了整个亚洲的现代货币命名： ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 西班牙机制银元与亚洲货币名称演变 accDescr: 西班牙银元因其圆形与齿边特征，演化出中国、日本、马来西亚等地的现代货币名称。 A["西班牙机制银币<br/>（高精度/圆形滚边）"] --> B["中文：圆 (Yuan)<br/>（取其浑圆形状）"] A --> C["日元：円 (Yen)<br/>（同指圆形硬币）"] A --> D["林吉特：Ringgit<br/>（马来语意为“锯齿状边缘”）"] A --> E["港币：Hong Kong Dollar<br/>（源自流通银元而非美刀）"] ``` - **词源的全球蔓延**： - 中文的“元 / 圆”（Yuan）和日元（Yen），名字直接来源于这枚银币浑圆的形状。 - 马来西亚货币“林吉特”（Ringgit）在马来语中的本义就是“锯齿”，指代硬币边缘的防削防伪齿痕。 - 香港的“港币”（Hong Kong Dollar）最初并非脱胎自美国美元，而是直接继承自这套在 18 世纪由华南贸易港口逐步向北渗入中国内地的西班牙银币系统。 - **主持人的幽默调侃**：主持人 Joe Weisenthal 打趣道，原来中国“不买西方商品、一心积累外部金融资产，同时全世界疯狂买中国货”的贸易顺差模式早已有几百年的历史渊源。 --- ### `34:28` 抛弃“法币”神话：美联储、曼昆教材与资产背书的本质 针对美元价值的来源，播客中展开了一场关于“法币”（Fiat）与“资产背书”（Backing）的深度交锋。主持人 Joe 提出，美元之所以具有购买力，本质上是因为央行通过维持大约 2% 的年通胀目标，向公众承诺：持有美元可以在未来稳定兑换由美国整体生产力构成的商品与服务篮子（即 CPI 或 PCE 涵盖的产出）。如果美国的实际经济生产力崩溃，这纸承诺便会化为乌有，美元自然一文不值。格里利完全赞同生产力与产出是根基，但他对流行教材中对“法币”轻描淡写的解释方式表达了极大的不满。 格里利以主流经济学教材（例如格里高利·曼昆编著的经典教材）为例，指出学生在课堂上学到的货币史被极度扁平化：先是物物交换，然后有金银硬币，接着纸币代金银，最后央行横空出世发行 M0，教材随即轻飘飘地下结论称“现代货币只是一种社会共识（social convention）”。格里利愤怒地反驳道：债券市场也是社会共识，房贷合同也是社会共识，但经济学家都会以严密的数学与制度细节去分析它们；唯独一谈到货币，大家仿佛立刻倒退回“凌晨两点在大学宿舍里嗑嗨了发呆扯淡”的虚无状态。仅凭自然资源并不能保证货币成功——阿根廷同样坐拥丰富的自然禀赋与生产力，却因货币发行机制设计不当而陷入持续动荡，这证明货币内部的制度微观机制至关重要。 - **对“法定信用”（Full Faith and Credit）的批评**：格里利认为这一口号往往被当成思维惰性的借口，仿佛只要国家发誓兜底，背后的清算、发行与抵押品机制就不再重要。 - **曼昆教材的叙事漏洞**：将复杂的金融与资产负债表机制缩减为一句抽象的“社会契约”，掩盖了现代银行体系运行的真实物理齿轮。 --- ### `36:34` 背书不等于兑换：从 19 世纪自由银行到罗德岛的恶性通胀 格里利梳理了现代人理解货币时的一大核心误区：混淆了“资产背书”（Backing）与“硬币兑换”（Redemption）。在 19 世纪美国设立美联储之前，银行体系虽然每隔一阵就会遭遇危机爆雷，但美元并非毫无价值。现代人往往误以为只有黄金和白银才算“背书”，但当时银行的资产负债表另一侧其实始终躺着实体经济的优质资产（如贴现票据、商业贷款和抵押物）。当美元脱离了对金银的自由兑换时，消失的只是“兑换机制”（Redemption），而这些锚定真实经济生产力的“资产背书”（Backing）从未消失。整个 19 世纪美国银行业的发展史，实际上是在摸索如何改善资产负债表管理，如何在安全资产与风险资产之间找到平衡。 与流行历史神话不同，美国各州政府和殖民地早先都曾自行发行纸币与先令。随着美国宪法颁布，宪法明确规定“各州不得发行信用票据（bills of credit）”，直接剥夺了各州制造货币的权力，并将这项职能全盘移交给了银行体系。格里利指出，后世往往想当然地认为州立纸币一塌糊涂、注定带来通胀，但历史事实是，除了一直极度放纵滥发、臭名昭著的罗德岛（Rhode Island）之外，大多数殖民地和州都摸索出了一套维持纸币稳定的金融最佳实践。在谈及百老汇音乐剧《汉密尔顿》时，格里利甚至因公开质疑亚历山大·汉密尔顿构建的全国性金融体系是否是唯一且最优解，而被历史学界同行调侃为“唯一一个因为汉密尔顿金融计划而对这部剧感到愤怒的人”。 - **背书（Backing） vs 兑换（Redemption）的核心区别**： - **背书**：银行资产负债表资产端存在的真实生产性经济资产与契约。 - **兑换**：持有人在特定窗口期内将纸币兑回实体金币或银币的边缘清算功能。废除金本位只是去除了兑换窗口，未消除实体资产背书。 - **罗德岛的“恶名”**：在殖民地及建国初期，罗德岛是唯一持续出现恶性通货膨胀的地区，成为当时破坏货币名誉的典型反面教材。 - **自我身份定位**：当主持人问及他是否属于古板的“硬通货死硬派”（hard money guy）时，格里利断然否认，明确表示自己是一个“信用货币派”（credit money guy），坚信信用机制只要制度得当，远比死守贵金属更为稳固有效。 ### `40:00` 抛弃“货币主权”假设与欧洲美元的本质 对话从主持人与嘉宾关于现代货币理论（MMT）的探讨切入。Brendan Greeley 指出，许多人包括他自己，都曾经历过与 MMT 思想长期纠缠、反复推演其合理性的过程，而他目前的观点正是这场长期思辨的终点。讨论核心随即转向美元的“完全信任与信用”（Full Faith and Credit），以及美元既作为特权又作为负担的全球角色——尤其是美联储为何频繁被要求向盟友提供离岸流动性支援。 Greeley 认为，一旦学者或投资者放弃“货币主权”（Monetary Sovereignty）这一僵化假设，庞大复杂的欧洲美元（Eurodollar）市场便豁然开朗。向普通大众解释欧洲美元向来极其困难，但如果借用海曼·明斯基（Hyman Minsky）的名言——“任何人都可以创造货币，难点在于让它被接受”——逻辑就变得极为清晰： * **自发创造的记账机制**：从20世纪50年代悄然萌芽、到70年代发展成庞大系统的欧洲美元，本质上是欧洲银行直接在其资产负债表的账本上增加美元记账凭证。它们制造美元的机制与美国本土商业银行毫无二致。 * **货币创造先于国家监管**：银行是自发创造这些美元的，而国家与主权机构往往只是在事后被动追赶与适应。 * **货币互换优于航母威慑**：Greeley 尖锐地指出，美元霸权与其说是“美利坚和平”（Pax Americana）或核动力航母的产物，倒不如说是美联储建立的“中央银行流动性互换额度”（Swap Lines）。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 欧洲美元生成与美联储流动性互换机制 accDescr: 展示海外商业银行如何凭空生成欧洲美元，并在流动性恐慌时由美联储通过央行互换额度提供最终背书。 subgraph Abroad["离岸市场 (非美银行)"] direction TB ED["制造欧洲美元<br/>(账本记账凭证)"] --> Crisis["流动性恐慌 / 挤兑"] end subgraph Official["官方兜底机制"] direction TB FCB["外国央行 (如ECB/BOJ)"] FED["美联储 (Federal Reserve)"] FED -- "临时货币互换 (Swap Line)" --> FCB end Crisis -- "寻求美元救助" --> FCB FCB -- "注资恢复账面信用" --> ED ``` 当非美机构在资产负债表上持有离岸美元时，它们不受美国监管章程约束，美国对其没有任何直接控制权。然而，一旦爆发挤兑或恐慌，美联储就会通过与其对应央行开展临时美元互换，让这些非美银行用本币交换真正的美联储美元以确保账面健全。Greeley 强调：“这恰恰证明美联储绝非美元的唯一发源地；这表明任何人都能创造美元，而只要你的机构足够关键，美联储就会承认‘这确实是美元，我们绝不会让它炸毁’。” --- ### `45:00` 央行外交、巴杰特选美与美国本土美元的护城河 美联储出手兜底并不源于慈善，而是因为全球美元链条一旦崩溃，美国本土居民和经济必遭反噬。Greeley 戏谑地将杰克逊霍尔（Jackson Hole）全球央行年会上美联储主席与其他央行行长并肩漫步的经典合影称为“巴杰特选美赛”（The Bagehot Pageant，致敬提出央行最后贷款人理论的沃尔特·巴杰特）。这种公开展示旨在向全球资本传达：央行掌舵人彼此熟稔、体系坚如磐石、发生下一次危机时美联储的美元流动性必定按时抵达。 面对主持人提出的关键疑问——“既然其他国家银行也能造美元，为何恐慌时大家争抢的依然是美联储和美国本土创造的美元？”——Greeley 阐明了美国本土美元无法被替代的三大支柱： * **实体生产力与资产厚度**：美国依然拥有全球最富生产力的庞大实体经济，拥有无可比拟的实体商品与资产作为底层支撑。 * **稳健的金融监管与联邦存款保险**：尽管监管制度面临持续游说与侵蚀，但美国拥有全球独一无二、由联邦全额保险的庞大资金池（FDIC）。相比之下，欧洲虽然监管尚可，但缺乏泛欧统一的共同存款保险机制。 * **美国国债（Treasuries）的无与伦比性**：美联储资产负债表的资产侧绝大部分是美债。凭借联邦政府强大的征税能力，没有任何其他全球资产在深度、流动性和安全性上能够匹敌美债。 Greeley 将央行货币互换抽象为“离岸制造的美元向美国本土制造的美元的贴现与兑换”。他总结道，货币经济学家习惯于从美联储作为唯一起点推演，但现实是货币生产源自社会网络各处；央行并不是凭空决定一切的源头，它本质上是一家由国家组建、用于替公共目标执行关键使命的“超级大银行”——正如英格兰银行（Bank of England）最初成立的法定目标仅仅是为对法战争筹措军费一样。 --- ### `48:00` 剖析财政部TGA账户：对MMT“税收驱动货币”理论的反驳 在讨论的后半段，主持人抛出了 MMT 的核心命题：**是否由于政府强制征税，才赋予了货币最初的普遍需求和“货币性”（Moneyness）？** Greeley 对此提出了鲜明反对，并直言这会让所有 MMT 信徒“脑袋爆炸”。他通过细致的底层会计逻辑（Accounting）解构了该观点的逻辑漏洞： * **美元形态的多样性与特定性**：市场上存在各种各样的美元，必须精确辨析财政部到底征收的是什么、支出的又是什么。 * **TGA 账户收支本质是银行美元**：美国财政部在美联储的官方账户——财政部一般账户（Treasury General Account, TGA）——所收缴的税款以及发行国债获得的资金，全部是商业银行系统创造的“银行美元”（Bank Dollars），财政部花出去的同样也是银行美元。 * **多维共识而非单一税收强制**：强制要求纳税人使用美国银行美元纳税固然重要，但这绝非其价值的唯一甚至主要源头。本土银行美元之所以具备购买力，是因为它依托着完整的审慎监管、联邦存款保险制度、美国强大的工业制造能力乃至深层的文化软实力。税收并不能凭空把一张白纸变成坚挺货币，货币价值依赖于支撑整套经济体系的综合信用生态。 ### `50:00` 北美殖民地纸币、偿债基金与被低估的古代金融智慧 布兰登·格里利（Brendan Greeley）深入探讨了北美殖民地时期的货币机制。当时几乎所有殖民地都发行过自己的纸币，通常的做法是印制纸币并在日后通过税收回收注销。然而，历史学界目前占主流的一种理论认为，这些纸币之所以有价值，纯粹是因为殖民地政府强制要求用它们来纳税（即“靠税收赋予价值”）。格里利指出，这种看法忽视了一个核心金融基础设施——偿债基金（sinking fund）。 实际上，从纽约、新泽西、宾夕法尼亚到马里兰，各殖民地都设立了偿债基金。其运作机制是：政府承诺在各个港口以金银形式征收通行费和港口关税，并定期使用这些金银储备回购并销毁（sink）市面上的纸币。也就是说，纸币体系背后始终有硬币（金银）作为底层依托。格里利开玩笑提到本杰明·富兰克林（Benjamin Franklin）印制先令纸币时，为了防伪在背面印上“伪造者死”（tis death to counterfeit），笑称如果自己去纹身，一定要把这句话纹在身上。他批评现代经济史研究往往带有一种傲慢，默认古代人不懂金融运作、只是歪打正着。但格里利在翻阅18世纪的《马里兰公报》（*Maryland Gazette*）时发现，当年的报刊通篇充斥着贴现率、伦敦汇票（bills of exchange）以及英格兰银行股价等深度讨论，其专业程度堪比现代金融分析师，古人对货币机制的理解远比现代人想象的要精深得多。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 殖民地纸币循环与偿债基金机制 accDescr: 展示殖民地政府通过发行纸币与港口征税，利用偿债基金回购注销以维持货币价值的闭环流程。 subgraph 发行与流通 A["殖民地政府<br/>印制纸币"] --> B["市场流通交易"] B --> C["税收回收<br/>部分注销"] end subgraph 偿债基金托底 D["港口关税与通行费<br/>(收取金银)"] --> E["偿债基金<br/>(Sinking Fund)"] E --> F["定期以金银回购纸币<br/>(维持币值托底)"] F -.-> B end ``` ### `51:43` 历史学家的“账本探案”：从新奥尔良马车商到糖厂庄园 谈到创作这本新书《全能的美元》（*The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money*）的档案调研经历，格里利调侃道，虽然自己在写书时成天向妻子抱怨写作之苦，但他打心底里热爱泡在档案馆和图书馆里。他强调，信件固然有趣，但人们在信里可能会说谎，而在账本（ledgers）上却很难造假——账本不存在“不可靠叙述者”的问题。阅读19世纪的账本就像在倒带看电影，能以小时为单位精确重现一个人的经济生活与人生起伏。 格里利在书中追踪了一位1830年代从新泽西搬到新奥尔良贩卖马车的商人的完整生涯： - 该商人似乎提前预知了1837年大恐慌（Panic of 1837）的到来，在危机爆发前精准套现离场。 - 随后他转型为糖厂庄园主。在圣詹姆斯堂区（St. James Parish）的种植园里，他的商业运转完全不使用任何实体硬币或纸币，全靠账面信用：他将糖卖给新奥尔良的代理经纪人（factor），经纪人维护着一本与他的经常账户账本；当他需要从新奥尔良采购物资时，只需写一封信，经纪人发货并从账上扣除金额；而在本地日常交易中，他则开具期票（promissory notes），这些期票背书累累、在种植园之间背对背流通。 - 格里利还顺藤摸瓜查到一起荒诞的坏账催收案：该商人的一张期票违约，新奥尔良的公证人（notary）前去追债，发现发票人已被妻子扫地出门、沦落到住在马厩里；公证人一路追踪到马厩，随后该男子竟偷了一匹马潜逃出城，迫使债主展开了一场横跨多地的长途追击。 ### `54:02` 档案研究的残酷真相与被遗忘的历史细节 当主持人问及历史学专业是否会系统教授如何寻找档案库和查阅技巧时，格里利直言“根本不教”。研究生院的训练重点全在理论、二手文献阅读和史学史（historiography），分析前人对历史的不同视点。而档案馆的研究则像极了某些原始部族的成人礼：导师把年轻人扔进荒野，对他说“自求多福吧，去杀一头狼再回来”。学者完全靠自己摸索出一套在档案堆中记录与检索的方法。 格里利分享了许多极具现场感的档案查阅体验： - **肉体与生存挑战**：档案馆往往地处偏僻、周边缺少餐饮，研究者必须常年在背包里备上蛋白棒补充体力；在查阅新奥尔良公民银行（Citizens Bank）的档案时，因该档案曾在卡特里娜飓风中被杜兰大学琼斯厅（Jones Hall）的洪水淹没，事后虽经紧急打捞与辐射灭菌，但纸页黏连并散发着有害物质，连翻两天就会让人身体恶心反胃。 - **“阅读档案的缝隙”**：档案馆保留的从来不是“历史发生的真相”，而是“被特意决定留存下来的记录”。例如，格里利通过流转于各庄园之间的几张期票账目，拼凑重构出圣詹姆斯堂区一位被奴役女性的生活轨迹，这种从冰冷财务条目中发掘受压迫者历史的过程被称为“在档案的缝隙中阅读”（reading between the archives）。 - **约翰·洛克的账本秘密**：格里利上月在伦敦档案馆查到了哲学家约翰·洛克（John Locke）完整的个人财务账本。令人啼笑皆非的是，这位在货币哲学理论中极度贬低信用、认为信用不是合格货币的思想家，其私人账本却显示他几乎买什么东西都在频繁使用信用。 ### `57:04` 货币发行的去中心化本质与美元标准 播客主持人在总结本期对谈时感慨，格里利的研究彻底打破了“美元完全受美国联邦政府掌控”的刻板印象。从早期的殖民地机构、各州银行到如今的欧洲美元（Eurodollars）离岸银行体系，历史上一直存在各种独立实体制造“自己的美元”，而这种分散的制造反过来迫使美国政府承担起支持与托底的义务。 主持人联想到威廉·詹宁斯·布莱恩（William Jennings Bryan）著名的“黄金十字架”（Cross of Gold）演讲，以及19世纪末期农民与独立铸币厂极力主张金银复本位制（bimetallism）和自由铸造银元的历史。这种分散制造、甚至近乎去中心化制造流通工具的冲动，贯穿了整个美国经济史。双方总结道，人类追求创造货币的欲望几乎是不可剥夺的本能，无论形式是原始的以物易物、信用记账，还是代币。美元之所以能称霸全球，关键在于它演变成了一种通用标准——就像任何制造商都能生产符合标准的CD光盘一样，美元具备极佳的“用户交互界面”（UI）与无与伦比的网络效应。 ### `01:00:00` 霸权衰落后依然通行的货币与节目收尾 对话在对美元未来命运的幽默而深远的遐想中画上句点。嘉宾与主持人设想了这样一幅未来图景：即便在极其遥远的未来，美国的全球霸权早已烟消云散，人们只能在历史教科书的字里行间读到“美国曾经是一个超级大国”之类的陈词滥调，全世界却依然在使用美元，美元依然作为核心结算工具而存在。“是的，它确实相当好用。完全没错，它是一种非常优秀的货币。”这种超越单一地缘政治实体兴衰的强大制度惯性与网络效应，恰如其分地总结了贯穿美元五百年发展史的核心生命力。 随着讨论落幕，主持人特蕾西·阿洛威（Tracy Alloway）与乔·魏森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）正式为本期《Odd Lots》播客划上句号。两人向听众致谢，并分享了节目主创及嘉宾的关注渠道与社群资源。他们呼吁对货币本质探讨感兴趣的听众在各大播客平台留下好评，并提示彭博订阅用户可以通过 Apple Podcasts 上的专属彭博频道享受全程无广告的收听体验。 - **主创与嘉宾账号**： - 本期嘉宾布伦丹·格里利（Brendan Greeley）：`@BHGreeley` - 联合主持人：Tracy Alloway（`@TracyAlloway`）与 Joe Weisenthal（`@TheStalwart`） - 节目制作团队：Carmen Rodriguez（`@CarmenArmand`）、Dashiell Bennett（`@Dashbot`）、Kel Brooks（`@KaleBrooks`）以及 Kevin Lozano（`@KevinLloydLozano`） - **官方社群与拓展资源**：听众可访问彭博官网专属主页（`bloomberg.com/odd-lots`）查阅往期节目与每日新闻通讯，亦可加入 Discord 讨论社区（`discord.gg/odd-lots`）参与全天候互动。 ### `01:00:35` 商业赞助与彭博下期节目预告 节目末尾播放了赞助商资讯及彭博精选内容预告。首先是定制宣传品服务商 4imprint 的品牌推广（`4imprint.com`）；紧接着是美属维尔京群岛（USVI）的文旅度假推介，重点介绍了圣托马斯（St. Thomas）、圣克罗伊（St. Croix）和圣约翰（St. John）三大岛屿的迷人沙滩、特色美食与本土文化，并提示美国本土旅客前往无需护照即可成行（官方访问网站：`visitusvi.com`）。 随后播出了彭博电视与播客深度访谈节目《Leaders with Francine Lacqua》的精彩预告。下期节目中，主持人弗朗辛·拉夸（Francine Lacqua）将对话知名商业投资人兼企业家阿曼达·斯塔维利（Amanda Staveley）。斯塔维利在预告中回顾了自己职业生涯中“最大胆、最需要魄力”的时刻——毅然选择离开纽卡斯尔联足球俱乐部（Newcastle United），坦言“这是我做过最艰难的决定”；同时她也谈及了对寻找下一家足球俱乐部的展望，直言自己始终渴望迎接全新挑战与激情。听众可通过彭博电视及全网各大播客平台收看与收听该系列专访。 ## Notable quotes > `00:00` 我爱钱 — Joe Weisenthal > `10:00` 一个中年男人长年把自己关在车库后面的独立办公室里，唯一相伴的只有一条狗，此时一旦产生新奇的想法，后果往往非同小可——要么是发现了学术新大陆，要么就是整个人疯掉了。 — Brendan Greeley > `10:00` 千万别去，这是个糟糕透顶的主意！ — 学者们 > `10:00` 我敢相信我‘竟然能够’做作业！这太棒了！以往的工作才是最糟糕的经历！ — Brendan Greeley > `15:40` 伟大的美国金曲名录（Great American Songbook）、乡村音乐（Country Music）、美式烤肉（Barbecue），以及一巨池享有联邦全额保险的美元（Federally Insured Dollars）。 — Brendan Greeley > `40:00` 任何人都可以创造货币，难点在于让它被接受 — Hyman Minsky > `40:00` 这恰恰证明美联储绝非美元的唯一发源地；这表明任何人都能创造美元，而只要你的机构足够关键，美联储就会承认‘这确实是美元，我们绝不会让它炸毁’。 — Brendan Greeley > `54:02` 自求多福吧，去杀一头狼再回来 — 导师 > `54:02` 在档案的缝隙中阅读 — Brendan Greeley > `01:00:00` 是的，它确实相当好用。完全没错，它是一种非常优秀的货币。 — Brendan Greeley ## Mentioned Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, Brendan Greeley, Mark Carney, Alexander Hamilton, J.K. Rowling, Seth Rockman, Harold James, Stefan Schlick, Carlo Cipolla, Friedrich Engels, Charles V, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Gregory Mankiw, Hyman Minsky, Walter Bagehot, John Locke, William Jennings Bryan, Francine Lacqua, Amanda Staveley, Federal Reserve, Bank of England, FDIC, 4imprint, Citizens Bank, Newcastle United, The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money, Maryland Gazette, Leaders with Francine Lacqua ## Video description <p>We love talking about money. And of course, we love talking about the dollar, in all its varieties &mdash; from bank deposits to eurodollars to stablecoins. But what fundamentally is a dollar and who actually controls it? To understand these questions, you need to understand how the dollar was born. Journalist (and current Ph.D. candidate in financial history) Brendan Greeley argues not only that the dollar is older than you might suspect, but that the dollar long precedes the United States itself. In fact, the word is derived from German, referring to a Spanish currency made from silver found in Mexico. In this episode, we discuss Brendan's new book, <em>The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money.</em> He explains not only the dollar's surprising history, but also what actually backs the US dollar and gives it purchasing power.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> [Source](https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/UVBrz8bN8aM2Xe47PEPu/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/8a94442e-5a74-4fa2-8b8d-ae27003a8d6b/5c7cfcd5-7600-4f26-bcf0-b457014d09c2/audio.mp3?in_playlist=982f5071-765c-403d-969d-ae27003a8d83)

[0:00] Joe Weisenthal: 我爱钱 [10:00] Brendan Greeley: 一个中年男人长年把自己关在车库后面的独立办公室里，唯一相伴的只有一条狗，此时一旦产生新奇的想法，后果往往非同小可——要么是发现了学术新大陆，要么就是整个人疯掉了。 [10:00] 学者们: 千万别去，这是个糟糕透顶的主意！ [10:00] Brendan Greeley: 我敢相信我‘竟然能够’做作业！这太棒了！以往的工作才是最糟糕的经历！ [15:40] Brendan Greeley: 伟大的美国金曲名录（Great American Songbook）、乡村音乐（Country Music）、美式烤肉（Barbecue），以及一巨池享有联邦全额保险的美元（Federally Insured Dollars）。 [40:00] Hyman Minsky: 任何人都可以创造货币，难点在于让它被接受 [40:00] Brendan Greeley: 这恰恰证明美联储绝非美元的唯一发源地；这表明任何人都能创造美元，而只要你的机构足够关键，美联储就会承认‘这确实是美元，我们绝不会让它炸毁’。 [54:02] 导师: 自求多福吧，去杀一头狼再回来 [54:02] Brendan Greeley: 在档案的缝隙中阅读 [60:00] Brendan Greeley: 是的，它确实相当好用。完全没错，它是一种非常优秀的货币。

[0:00] Joe Weisenthal: I love money [35:00] Brendan Greeley: Rhode Island seems to be the reason why we can't have nice things [35:00] Brendan Greeley: Your mortgage is a social convention. And somehow when the subject comes to money, we're back in a dorm room with Joe at two o'clock in the morning going, 'Who knows, man?' [40:00] Brendan Greeley: Anybody can create a dollar... If you're important enough to the Fed, they'll say, 'You know what? It is a dollar. We're going to make sure that that doesn't blow up.' [48:30] Benjamin Franklin: Tis death to counterfeit

[0:00] Whatever your goal, trade show giveaways, client gifts, or team gear, 4imprint has the promo products to match. With thousands of options, from apparel and drinkware to tech and totes, it's easy to find the right fit for your brand and budget, with standout choices at every price point. And with their 360-degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will show up just right, right on time. Explore more at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. So there's a lot of noise about AI. But time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94% of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, that isn't always easy. Risk can touch multiple parts of an organization at the same time often in ways that aren immediately obvious It might involve property liability or cyber It could stem from regulatory requirements or challenges tied to a specific industry or the scale of an operation At that level managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline not a one decision At The Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. That means working with companies to identify where they're exposed, decide what matters most, and put practical standards in place so risk is managed as part of day-to-day operations. And when losses do happen, The Hartford can pair that risk control work with insurance coverage grounded in underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience developed over time. Learn more at the Hartford dot com slash risk mitigation. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, we enjoy talking about money. Yeah. In all its flavors. I love money. We all love money Someone going to clip that That it That the podcast Someone going to clip that out Joe saying I love money You know I love money talking about it in particular having it good too talking about it nice Finding it is even better. What you can do with it, where you can allocate it to all very interesting questions. But I have to admit I am a sucker for like a good old-fashioned two in the morning, where does money come from discussion. You know what I'm saying? I have never been invited to any of your 2 a.m. in the morning. Where does money come from? Discussions like which came first, the money. You know, I love like I love philosophy of money. That sort of like history of money. Yeah. All that stuff. It's a great topic. There are a lot of social implications tied up with the idea of money, which I think, you know, have been explored at various times. But they're always so interesting to me because I think even today, if you think about money and if you think about the dollar specifically, you know, we're used to talking about like. the dollar is doing this the dollar is doing that but there's more than one flavor of the dollar right so there's clearly cash at a simplistic level so the stuff that we keep in our wallets or whatever there are bank dollars yeah that are created by a bank and live in the bank in which you never tangibly see but you can do a lot of stuff with if you have them You can convert them to cash dollars at a one ratio That right They traded a one ratio to the other dollar That's the important thing. But there are also things like euro dollars, which you and I will never see being a non-foreign depository institution. And there are reserves held at the central bank, which is arguably its own thing, right? There are also stable coins, which are dollar, also often aspire to trade a one-to-one ratio to the dollar, et cetera. What is the dollar? You know what's an interesting question? So one of the topics that comes up a lot is the future of the dollar, et cetera. We don't talk as much about where did it come from in the beginning? And if we're going to talk about the future of the dollar, don't we need to know how we got here and how the dollar was born and all that stuff? That seems like an important question to answer before we talk about the future. Yes. And also just in terms of social and political economy terms, like who actually controls the dollar? Right. Because there's this idea that it belongs to the U.S. Treasury. They control the supply and all of that. But as I just mentioned, there are all these flavors of dollars that kind of sit outside the U.S.'s direct control. And so if you think about the dollar being... [5:00] You know, the both an exorbitant privilege of America. It's also in many respects a burden. Right. Yeah. So they say, I mean, I don't know. It seems pretty good as a currency, but I've heard that. And it is very interesting to think about, like, you know, you know, there's this interest. I think it was it was Mark Carney when he was Bank of England governor. He gave a Jackson Hole speech talking about America's declining role as a share of global GDP and the dollar's increasing role as the currency of trade and this weird mismatch. And there's all this stuff where it's like the central bank, the Fed sets rates based on American conditions and so forth, but then that transmits globally because so many entities use the dollar. We could go on and on. This intro is just going to be a Forrest Gump-style list of all the different types of dollars. But no, I mean, we should talk about all the different types of dollars, but also where they all came from and what all their different purposes actually are and what the upsides are for each of them and the downsides. And we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. Yes. Someone who's been one of our colleagues at various places. We going to be speaking with Brendan Greeley He the author of the new book The Almighty Dollar 500 Years of the World Most Powerful Money And you might have a question immediately about that 500 years subtitle He's also a contributing editor of the Financial Times, and we're very excited to have him on All Thoughts. So, Brendan, welcome to the show. Thank you. I've been waiting so long to be the perfect guest. Oh, did I say you were? I did. You did, in fact, say I was the perfect guest. I was waiting. I was hoping. I'm sitting here. I'm paranoid that I'm not going to say it, and people read into it like, oh, why wasn't this person the perfect guest? Just a one-of-the-mill guest. How embarrassing. You are truly the perfect guest. Why don't I jump in with that subtitle? So a lot of people are going to see 500 years of the dollar, the world's most powerful currency and most powerful money, and they're going to go, what do you mean by 500 years? So this book was a rabbit hole. An editor suggested I write a book about the history of the dollar, and as you know, as a journalist, when somebody asks you to do something, you just say, yeah, I'll figure that out. What's the deadline? Yeah, I've got a phone. I can call people. And I thought I would start it in 1971. We closed the gold window and then I sort of started unraveling the sweater a little bit, pulling on the thread. And I got to 1913 with the chartering of the Fed. And then you end up with a problem when you chase the history of the dollar back to 1789 or 1776 which is there this assumption when we talk about money of monetary sovereignty This is just the ability It very poorly defined It super hand by the way monetary sovereignty but generally it the ability that a country has to control its own currency. So under that assumption, we had political independence, political sovereignty in 1776, 1789, however you want to define it. We should have also had monetary sovereignty under the assumptions that we use about money. Unfortunately, we're stuck with this problem, which is that our currency is called the dollar. That is a name that's derived from the German, and it referred to a Spanish coin that came from Bolivian silver or Mexican silver. Really? I didn't know this. So this is complicated, right? We did not have this moment of sovereignty. We did not have a new country. We did not call our currency the Washington. We called it the dollar, which means we're borrowing something else. We are pegging our currency as Americans at the origin of the country to an existing currency. You know, it's hard for Americans to sort of conceive of how insignificant the colonies were at the founding. And so we didn't have any domestic source of gold. We didn't have any domestic source of silver. We taking a global currency that circulating between the Andes and China and through Europe And sometimes it washes up on the shores of the colonies We so desperate to get it that we then peg our currency to this silver coin with a German name that comes from Spain's empire. That's really problematic if you believe in monetary sovereignty and if you believe that the country creates the denominator. So now you have a problem, or at least I had a problem, which is I had to explain what was this coin? Why was it universal? Why was it called the taller or the dollar? Why was Spain in charge? And why were the colonies powerless to do anything about this coin? Then you end up with a different story. Alexander Hamilton called that coin the ancient dollar. It was already something that he knew existed, that he took for granted as 250 years old at the time. That's when I fell down the rabbit hole. And that's when I ended up literally at one point at the bottom of a Czech silver mine, because what we think of as the dollar starts in 1520. And this ends up being a problem because all of the way economists talk about money, there's this break between metal and paper. So it's very difficult to talk about this metal coin when we live in a paper and digital money world now. I think there's a connection. And I think the moment of transition between that coin and American bank money is really important. The details matter. The coin's story. [10:00] circulated in America as currency until the 1850s, the silver coin from the Spanish Empire. And so to tell the story of the dollar, what I realized is you cannot tell the story of the country. This is not the story of the Treasury Department or the Fed or of Alexander Hamilton or of America. This is the story of the currency, which is only sometimes a part of America. I'm already riveted by this. I already have a million questions. Just to back up a little bit or contextualize this. That was just last summer. We were at Princeton. You were getting your PhD there, and you invited us to be on a panel, and we actually turned it into a podcast episode where we talked to a few other academics and so forth, and I think that little mini conference was about writing the biography of the dollar, which you have. I guess you've done it now. I hope so. It's a book. Tell us a little bit about what you've been up to. You're getting a PhD. It's so cool. like when I sometimes in my mind, I'm like, if I could have done something else, maybe it would have been go get a history PhD. And you actually did it. I actually did. Yeah. So, you know, I got this offer to write the book about the dollar as a journalist. I said yes. And then I kind of got into trouble because I started doing archival work and I didn really feel like I knew how to do archival work And I started reading a lot of secondary sources And then I began to have ideas That a problem Because when you are a person alone in an office behind your garage with a dog for years, and you start to have- What kind of dog? Oh, he's- These are the important questions. He's an awful dog. We'll talk about it later. He's famous on the internet. Oh, really? Yes. I had no idea. An internet mob made me get a dog because my daughter did something cute. She was begging for a dog. And then I woke up the next morning and I put it on Twitter. I made the mistake of putting this on Twitter seven years ago. I woke up the next morning and J.K. Rowling. Yeah, now you have a dog. Oh, my God. Yeah. So the dog's name is J.K. Growling. So I'm in this room alone with J.K. Growling, the dog sitting on the floor. And I begin to have ideas. The problem is, if you have ideas alone in a room, one of two things is true. You're onto something or you're insane. And I got worried that I didn't know what I was doing. And around the same time, I got invited by Seth Rockman, he's a historian of early America at Brown, to a conference about the history of money. I literally did not know that there were historians who studied money. And I loved what they did. They were reading all the same things that I was reading. They were worried and they were curious about all the same things that I was curious about. They were dealing with the same questions. And I told a bunch of PhDs this is amazing I want to go get a PhD in the history of money And they all said no do not do that That a terrible idea as PhDs generally do But I applied to the program at Princeton because Harold James is there. He's a legendary financial historian. And I love the way he works because he takes finance seriously. And sometimes it's difficult to study the history of money because it does end up sounding like this 2 a.m. dorm conversation. That frustrates me. I actually you don't think money is that hard to understand. It's just finance. And so Harold James takes the finance of money seriously. And I was able to, you know, while I was taking classes there, think about this book and also make myself feel a little more comfortable that the book is in fact, it rests on solid ground. The people that I found as secondary sources, they are known to other people, right? And I am, this book is written within a tradition of thinking about money as credit and that, but also to your point, like, yeah, it's great. I love going back and getting a PhD. There was a moment early on where I was doing a project with another grad student and they're all in their twenties. And I make no sense to them because I was like 47 when I started it. And I had four children and everything about me was a mystery. They had a pool going for a while and whether or not I wasn't on Instagram. But one of the graduate students said, can you believe you doing homework And I said I can believe I get to do homework This is amazing I had jobs Jobs are the worst I sorry I gone down a rabbit hole just looking at pictures of J growling But you absolutely right It went viral There like Fox News articles about it Yeah, everything. OK, a serious question now. We're not just going to talk about dogs, although I did learn from your book that there were, in fact, dog dollars. Dog dollars. Yes. Yes. So serious question, though. Why does it matter how we think about money? Is it the case that if you think of money as inevitably this fiat currency that's issued by a state, that you're always going to think that the state is about to do something terrible with it or something nefarious, versus if you think about it as a social construct, it implies something different about the world and human behavior. Why does this matter? I get really frustrated with the philosophy of money. and I get really frustrated with the phrase fiat or the idea of fiat money, because fiat to me is a veil. It just says it's magic. The state says, poof, that's money. And they wave their hands, they say fiat. And then you have something and that's money. And how it worked doesn't really matter. I think it really matters how we manufacture money. Banks manufacture our money. The Fed manufactures a different kind of money. I love that list you guys came up with of all the dollars. I keep trying to list all the dollars I can come up with. [15:00] not completed the list yet. I was going to ask you how long you mentioned this in the book. Like, how long is your list? I think once, man, I'm going to embarrass myself. I try to recreate it, but I got up to like 15 different kinds of dollars. Wow. You know, you've got money market dollars. Now you've got stable coins, euro dollars, of course. You know, if you if you get a check from your employer, you don't have a bank account. You got to go to a check cashier. All of a sudden, that's a different kind of dollar because it doesn't clear it par because you got to do a you got to take a discount at the check cashier. OK, but my frustration with this idea of fiat is that it robs us of the power of analysis. We can understand money. We really can. For almost all of our money sits, as you guys already pointed out, on the ledger of a commercial bank. It has value for two reasons. One, the assets on the other side of that ledger have value as well. And we can look at them. We can tell, you know, are those good assets? Are those bad assets? And the reason we know what the assets are is because America has this 250-year tradition of bank failure. And after every systemic bank failure, we introduced new regulations, new way of reporting what's on the bank ledgers, the idea of a control of the currency followed the Panic of 1837. We slowly figured out how to make sure that banks don blow up The FDIC after the Panic of 1932 you know I really honestly believe that of the great things that america has produced it you know the great american songbook country music barbecue and a vast pool of federally insured dollars we had several look at look at joe yeah yeah joe's on board we need to put the federally insured dollars on that mug we need an fdic i need an fdic country music barbecue and federally insured dollars that's good that would be a good name for a song, actually. The problem with saying that it's fiat means that we fail to understand how important all these regulations are. Before federal deposit insurance in the 1920s, there were about 200 bank failures a year. After that, there are usually no bank failures a year. And if there are bank failures, we're so surprised by them that it becomes a thing in the financial media that we've got to talk about. How did this happen? That used to be normal. Banks used to just fail and the reason they don't fail and the reason your dollars don't fail is because we have slowly figured out what the best practices are for making sure that banks don't blow up. If we wave our hands and say doesn't matter, it's fiat, probably comes from the Fed, doesn't really matter, then we lose the ability to say our dollars have meaning because there's assets on the other side of that balance sheet We can look at those assets and if we start to deregulate we run into trouble because all of a sudden we run the risk that our dollars might not have meaning anymore Whether you're planning a big tech event, launching a new campaign, or just stocking up on team gear, finding the right promotional products makes all the difference. 4imprint offers thousands of options, from on-trend apparel and premium drinkware to tech, totes, and giveaways, so you can find the right fit for any audience, purpose, or budget. You can customize it all, your logo, your message, your look, and many items come with no setup charge to help you save. And if you're really watching the bottom line, you'll find standout choices at every price point, so you can make a real impact while staying on budget. Plus, you'll get expert help, fast turnaround times, and their 360-degree guarantee. So you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive on time and look exactly right. Whatever your goal, 4imprint makes it easy to find your perfect promo match. Explore the possibilities today at 4imprint 4imprint 4certain The U Virgin Islands invites you to discover the stunning beauty of St Thomas St Croix For imprint for certain Just easy travel. Whether it's the world-famous Trunk Bay in St. John that was voted the best beach in the world, the picturesque Megan's Bay Beach, or the stunning Point Udall, America's easternmost point, USVI will take you to a place that no other Caribbean destination can match. For most, the U.S. Virgin Islands is just a quick nonstop flight or a simple connection away. Start planning your getaway to America's Caribbean at visitusvi.com. That's visitusvi.com. USVI, naturally in rhythm. Get the news you need in just 15 minutes. Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the podcast with a global view on the stories that matter. I'm Nathan Hager. And I'm Karen Moscow. Join us each morning for curated stories on current events, politics, business, and foreign relations. Plus one conversation. [20:00] on the day's biggest developments, all in just 15 minutes. Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for a precise, thoughtful take on the stories that matter. Listen to Bloomberg Daybreak each morning on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. I want to get into how we can establish why a dollar has value in the first place and the balance sheet liabilities of the bank and so forth. Before we get into that, let's just do a little bit more history. What were the conditions such that in 1791 or whatever, Alexander Hamilton was talking about something called an ancient dollar that was sort of something Spanish and German at the same time? Give us those 250 years prior to the founding of America or however many years such that a global dollar was already long emerging. Let's see if I can do this in a way that I don't run out of time. Okay. The dollar wasn't supposed to be money. Okay. There is a story. It is told in Histories of the Dollar that there was a count in Bohemia. His name was Stefan Schlick. He had a lot of silver because he had a lot of silver. His money became global money. None of that is true. I mean, it's all true, but that's not how any of it worked. So Stefan Schlick was a count The problem is he didn actually hold any of the territory that he claimed in Bohemia He sort of held it in entirety with all of his cousins and all of his brothers Somebody discovered silver in this valley in Bohemia The problem with silver in the ground is that you need a lot of money and a lot of expertise It takes a lot of capital, even in the 1520s, to mine silver. Very complex machines already getting silver out of the ground, draining water out of the mines. And so he realized that just having the silver didn't mean anything. So first thing he did was he said, this is mine, breathtakingly illegal. Then he went over the border to Saxon and he got Saxon mining investors and Saxon miners, and they started pulling silver out of the ground. So this is already outside of a long established process of what you do with silver and how it becomes money. In the rest of Europe and in the rest of Bohemia, if you found silver, first of all, you had to pay a tax to the king. After that, it had to go to a centralized mint. That mint had an understanding that they had to create money for everybody. So not just big coins for merchants, but the whole range of big and little coins that worked for wholesale purchases and retail purchases. This is really crucial. I think this distinction still exists today, but it definitely existed in early modern Europe, which is that Carlo Cipolla is an Italian historian wrote this beautiful book where he drew a distinction between big money and little money Big money are large high value coins and they for international trade and merchants and the wealthy Little money is for low value trade and it for purchases of meat and bread and labor So like little copper coins. Yeah, little copper coins. The challenge of big money and little money, I think we still have it today with banks, is that you're going to love this, Joe. The brassage on small coins is higher. What that means is to make a coin is an industrial process. You've got to put one die on a stump and then the metal goes in the middle and then another die on top of it. And then whack the whole thing with a hammer. I've seen it done. It's very loud. It's an industrial process. It takes one whack of the hammer to make every coin, whether it's a big coin or a little coin, which means that per unit of value, the labor costs, the brassage, the production costs are much higher for little coins. So this is a consistent problem throughout the history of coinage. constant complaints that mints, which are actually private companies, prefer to make the big coins because the profit is high. The margins are better on the big coins. They're smaller on the small coins. This is partly why the U.S. phased out the penny recently, right? Yes, absolutely. What you have then in this Bohemian Valley is Saxon investors coming south, Saxon miners coming south, Bohemian count who doesn really have title And what they do is they start getting silver out of the ground All of the silver goes into a single form which is what the Saxon investors would have expected to get a large silver dividend coin This was not local money This was not money for a valley in Bahemia. This was paying back silver investors. It went straight. A dividend in silver form. A dividend in silver form. What they expected. So this is an early form of a joint stock company. Friedrich Engels actually believed that this was the origin of the joint stock company. These Silver mines are just really expensive to get money out of the ground. So Saxon investors would put together in this form, and what they got out of this was a big silver coin. It wasn't money. It was a dividend. It was a stamped, pure form of silver. So you have this exception where because the mine is illegal, what's coming out of it is big, high-value silver coins. No pennies, no little money, nothing. Just big money. So all of this work, by the way, I should credit Peter Voril as a Trek historian who sort of pulled all of this out of the archives. But what you then end up with is this exceptional circumstance where it's not that there was a lot of silver in the valley. It was a big silver mine, but it wasn't wildly out of proportion with other silver mines in Europe. It's that it was only producing big coins. And it was so hell bent on producing just the big dividend coins for sacks and silver investors that the miners revolted actually. So they struck twice and then they finally sacked the town because they were not. [25:00] And their chief complaint was that they weren't getting paid in the same quality money that was leaving for Saxony. You have this big money, little money problem. So eventually, to make the miners happy, they have to solve this and sort of make sure that they're minting little pennies as well. Anyway, this coin then becomes a standard for trade in the Baltic. And you start to see copies of the coin. This is in a sovereign story. You create your own money to your own standards. What actually happened is you get little city-states and kingdoms all over the Baltic in northern Germany creating copies of copies of copies of this original coin from Joachimstall. All these coins come to be referred to as Joachimstaller, coins from Joachimstall. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? It doesn't. So that gets shortened to taller. And then in Dutch, they also start copying. Sounds like Weisentaller. Yes. Yes. You were from some tall. I'm watching Joe's head is exploding in real time. Listen, we should mint Weisenthaler. See what happens. Tall is German for valley, right? So then you get taller all over Northern Europe. So this then becomes an English dollar. There's a mention of dollar in Shakespeare in The Tempest and again in the Scottish play. They talk about dollars It not in the domestic British currency system of pounds shilling pence To them they know exactly what it is The big silver coin that comes from the low countries in exchange for British wool and British cloth So already this story of sovereignty and the story of the fungibility of money starts to break apart. You've got this coin that's copied again and again. OK, so the Spanish have silver in what is now Bolivia and Mexico. They figure out this unbelievable, brutal regime, the Mita, to, you know, using forced labor to actually get the silver out of the ground. They've got the mercury from somewhere else to do the amalgamation process that actually then turns the silver, turns, you know, ore into silver. The thing is, Charles V of Castile, Holy Roman Emperor, lord of all he surveys, has to follow the pattern of silver production that already exists in northern Germany. He's selling his silver into the same silver markets in Antwerp as everybody else, which means that he does not have the sovereign right or the sovereign ability to create his own silver. So they sort of hack an existing coin in the Spanish currency system, the real. If you multiply it by eight, there's a happy accident, which is that it's almost exactly the same weight and size as the Yachimstallar. So Spain starts. Is this why a quarter is two bits? Yes, that's exactly why. Yeah. So pieces of eight that we know from uh from pirate movies right That that what that was The piece of the pirate movies piece of eight is named because the Yaakam taller with the dominant form of silver and Spain had to had to copy it So all you have this global flow of silver already. The Spanish in the late 1570s develop a way to send galleons straight from the Mexican coast to Manila. So you've got this flow of silver that's going straight to China. It's going through Seville and into Europe. It's also making its way to China. China is sort of absorbing all the silver in the world eventually. It all takes the form of this dollar. In English, it's known as the dollar. Unambiguous. Very clear what it is. So the colonies are also stuck on the edge of this flow. And what you get is actually weird currency devaluations among the colonies. So to get to the Alexander Hamilton point, I think I'm going to wrap this up. I think I maybe did it in seven minutes. you end up with the colonies have got their own forms of shilling-based book credits. They're separate currencies from what the British have. It's not sterling. It's Pennsylvania shillings or Maryland shillings. What starts to happen is they start to devalue their own shillings. So to attract silver, sometimes literally from pirates of the Caribbean, into their own ports, because that makes the silver then can buy more in that port, which means the port can attract more silver. This is a problem the British Empire eventually recognizes But this coin you see it in newspapers referred to as dollars People were off of rewards and won ads for dollars Colonies are fighting each other with currency devaluations to try and attract the dollar onto their shores. So this is by far the dominant form of money, not just in the colonies, but globally. That was great. That was fantastic. If I could fast forward a few decades at least. 2026. No, no, no, not that far. I asked this question partly out of personal interest because as Joe knows, for some reason, my dad keeps giving me parts of his collection of silver coins. Oh yeah, that's what dads do. Yeah, I know. It's the most dad thing ever. And every birthday I'm like, thank you for my silver coin. But it's lost some of the surprise value. But anyway, how did we get from the dollars slash dollars to the silver dollar that became, I guess, dominant in, I want to say, the 1800s? It's just a copy. We didn't get to. It's the same thing. So you have copies of copies of copies. Anybody who has silver or can get some through trade is turning them into something that looks like a dollar and is immediately recognized as a dollar. So when you look at colonial legislation, you've got catalogs of different kinds of dollars. You've got a Seville dollar, which meant it was minted at very high quality in Seville. You've got what they called a Rix dollar, which is, [30:00] by the Holy Roman Empire. Exact same thing. They were weighted the same way. And then it goes all the way down to, as you mentioned, dog dollars. So there's this Dutch dollar. Love dog dollars. Dog dollars. So there's this Dutch dollar with a recumbent lion on the obverse. The recumbent lion, once it gets worn down, looks like a dog begging for scraps. Yeah, he's sort of sitting up and begging, right? Yeah, he's begging. Exactly. So the dog dollar, when Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia, wet and exhausted as a teenager, he had in his pocket a few shillings and a dog dollar. So there were different types of dollars, but it was always very clear what a dollar was. So in the 18th century and even into the 19th century, so these silver dollars, again, I'm going to say this again and again, I'm sort of very skeptical of the idea of monetary sovereignty. I think you cannot assume that it happens. It has to be fought for over time. It's always fraught, and you're going to lose it if you don't pay attention to it. But just to finish that thought, the silver dollar that comes from Mexico is current in America as money until the 1850s. Okay, this is sort of what I was getting at with the question, but how did we get to the point where the silver dollars that we recognize today and the collections that our parents bequeathed to us I think just your parents Okay No mine Not yours Okay. My dad gives me life lessons, but not silver. Oh, my dad doesn't give me many of those, actually. Okay. But the silver dollars become a more dominant form of currency around the world in the 1800s. Yes. What are the conditions that allow those dollars to start to replace previous or other existing forms of dollars? One thing that happens is you get high quality mints in Mexico City and in Potosí. This is the this is the mountain where the silver is in what is now Bolivia. And so early on, the Spanish Empire produced what they called cobs. These are just just little divots of silver stamped and weighed. And they circulated as cobs. You could get them in the colonies. but there's fraud at the mint. There's a problem with the weight of the silver. And so this is in the, man, it's in the early 18th century. The Spanish figure this out, and they make sure that colonial mints are as reliable, are producing coins that are as reliable as the mint at Seville. So now all of a sudden, every piece of silver that leaves those mines is in the form of this dollar This is when you start to see dollars show up in hordes in China So cobs had been showing up in China The Chinese again are absorbing all the silver in the world no matter where it coming from is headed for China because it buying porcelain and silk They weren't interested in any products other than silver that came from Europe. Are you saying that China has a history of not buying things from around the world except accumulating financial assets while the world buys things from China? I'm doing that, Trump. I'm hearing this for the first time. I'm saying that while writing this book, I anticipated this conversation and I'm so happy you took the bait. All right, keep going. So now to Tracy's question, what you start to see in China is, you know, not just cobs showing up in hoards. These are, you know, every once in a while during construction, someone will find a box of coins. That tells us a little bit about what people used at the time. So when you date the coins to the 18th century, you actually start to see these really nice, high quality, round milled coins. And this is when. So the word Yuan refers to this coin. Yen refers to this coin. The Malaysian ringgit actually means jagged, which refers to the milling on the edge of this coin. This coin becomes a global standard. The Hong Kong dollar is not derived from the American dollar. It derived from this very specifically shaped and trustworthy piece of silver in the 18th century that began to circulate not just intercontinentally but domestically within China It starts to move north from the trading ports in the south So it the quality of the mint to answer your question It sort of Spain Empires are hard to manage It pretty difficult to figure out how to get silver out of a hole on the ground on the other side of an ocean and then turn it into a high-quality coin. Over time, they figure this out. And as they figure this out, you've got one empire, one silver, one coin. It's going everywhere. Super interesting. You say a dollar has some value because there are assets on the other side of the bank that have value. So first of all, I agree with your premise that this idea that there is some bright line difference between fiat versus back money or something, that's sort of nonsense. I've come around. I used to believe it. Now I think I agree with you. To my mind, if someone asked me why does the dollar have value, I would say it's because we have a central bank that promises this dollar can be redeemed for a basket of goods and services that will only get 2% more expensive every year. that there is this sort of hard assets backing the US dollar. And you can go look what it is. There's everything that's in the CPI or PCE basket. And we promise that we're going to keep the ratio so that they only get 2% more expensive every year. We're not going to violate. [35:00] that promise over time. Isn't it that ability to actually extract some share of the national output of America that is why someone would want to hold dollars? And if the US could no longer produce anything productive, the central bank couldn't uphold that 2% claim, and then the dollar value. Yeah, absolutely. But the mechanics and the detail matter. So Argentina also is blessed with natural resources. And yet the details of how it produces money are not working out as well as they are in the United States. So I'm not a big fan of fiat, as I've said. I'm also not a big fan of the idea of full faith and credit, because that, again, just says it doesn't really matter how it works. Eventually, the country will back it. Well, how it works is really important. And I think it's important because it allows us to then talk about the mechanics of how the Fed actually works in the story that we all got in our textbooks. I will not profess to know when you guys went to college, but I went back and looked at my textbook and we had Mancou at Tulane University in 1995. It hasn't changed from recent versions of the Mancou textbook. And the history of money is just kind of glossed over There used to be coins and then the paper represented the coins And then now we got a central bank and it fiat and the central bank produces M zero It really that simple And then he says this drives me crazy Now money is just a social convention. Oh, is it, Greg, a social convention? Are we all of a sudden talking about social mores in this economics textbook? Like the bond market is a social convention. And yet we analyze it with some, you know, with some rigor. Your mortgage is a social convention. And somehow when the subject comes to money, we're back in a dorm room with Joe at two o'clock in the morning. and going, who knows, man? I've come around. What I'm saying is I believe that- We might agree. We might agree. I'm saying I think it's sort of like, why does a dollar have a value? Because in the United States, there's a lot of productivity of goods and services and I can redeem them at a fairly stable price from this year to the next. I'll hold dollars for 10 years and that basket of goods will get more expensive over 10 years. But roughly, I'll be able to redeem it again at some point for real physical things. I think we 100% agree. Okay, great. But the details of that system, I think we should not be scared of those details. Yeah, yeah, okay. And I think you also run into a problem, you know, I would say this because I'm training as a historian now, but you run into a problem when you think of the Fed as the origin and the protector of dollars, which is that we had dollars in the 19th century before we had a Fed and they kind of worked They blew up every once in a while It better to have a central bank but it not as if dollars were completely valueless And I think historically we run into a problem because we not precise about what backing is I think we think now that backing is just gold or silver. That's not the way they thought about it at the time. There is backing, which are the assets that sit on the other side of this ledger. And then there's redemption, which is, can you redeem it for gold and silver? So when we stopped redeeming financial dollars for gold and silver, the backing didn't go away. All of these assets, which, to your point, are productive assets in the real economy, they still existed. We just got better at managing the system so that we no longer needed the edge case of occasional redemption for gold and silver. And so what you see over the course of the 19th century history of American banks is slowly over time getting better at managing what assets are on the bank's balance sheet. How do we make sure the bank has what we says it has? How do we make sure the bank has the right mix of safe assets and risky assets? That took a while to figure out. America had a unique banking system. There were dollars and shillings produced by colonial governments and then state governments right after the revolution that were wiped clean by the Constitution Constitution says states may not issue bills of credit That expressly took money out of the job of the states I don think they had to by the way We tend to assume that this was a good thing, that they were a disaster, that they were inflationary. Some were, some weren't. Consistently in the colonial period and then again after the Revolutionary War, the only truly inflationary money was Rhode Island. Rhode Island seems to be the reason why we can't have nice things. I knew it. Rhode Island is just extremely easy. Oh, man. You guys are going to get emails. But we didn't have to end that experiment. It kind of worked. Colonies came up with best practices to make sure why financially that colonial paper money had value. What we did was, with the Constitution, we wiped all that clean and we handed it to the banks. I was with a group of historians and we're having dinner and we ended up talking about Hamilton, the play. As one does. As one does. And I said I was frustrated because I don't think that we should take it for granted that Alexander Hamilton's financial system was the one that had to happen or that it was necessarily the best one for everyone. And one of the historians said, you're literally the only person I know who finds that problematic because of the financial plan. Just going back to the full- You're like a non-crank hard money guy. Oh. No, sorry. No, sorry. No, I'm a credit money guy. It's all right. I'm a credit money guy. All right. Okay. [40:00] I mean, OK. No, I didn't mean I was trying to start asking a question and I threw that. But I want to come back to that. I just lobbed that grenade in there. Because you and I have the same history of like encountering MMT at the same time and wrestling with it and trying to figure out, like, does it make sense? Does it not make sense? And this where I am right now is at the end of that long process of wrestling with that. We'll get to that. Thank you. Thank you expert help fast turnaround times and their 360 guarantee So you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive on time and look exactly right Whatever your goal 4imprint makes it easy to find your perfect promo match Explore the possibilities today at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. The U.S. Virgin Islands invites you to discover the stunning beauty of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. The U.S. Virgin Islands is truly a magical place, one of a kind, and unlike any other destination. With incredible food, warm hospitality, vibrant culture, and breathtaking beaches, it's everything you could want in a vacation. And the best part? No passport is required when traveling from the U.S. No hassle, just easy travel. Whether it's the world-famous Trunk Bay in St. John that was voted the best beach in the world, The picturesque Megan's Bay Beach or the stunning Point Udall, America's easternmost point. USVI will take you to a place that no other Caribbean destination can match. For most, the U.S. Virgin Islands is just a quick nonstop flight or a simple connection away. Start planning your getaway to America's Caribbean at visitusvi.com. That visitusvi USVI naturally in rhythm Got a business problem There a TED Talk for that Stay updated on everything business on TED Business a podcast hosted by Columbia Business School professor Modupe Akinola. Every week, she'll introduce you to leaders with unique insights on work, answering questions like, how do four-day work weeks work? Do will a machine ever take my job? Get some surprising answers on TED Business wherever you listen to podcasts. Just going back to the full faith and credit part of the conversation and the idea of the dollar as both, you know, a source of privilege and at times a potential burden on the U.S. or at least something that can be mismanaged in various ways. Can I ask something that's going on right now? So just bringing it up to 2026. Talk to us about like, I guess, the impositions that the dollars roll in the global financial system actually put on the central bank such that we see headlines where it's like, you know, the Federal Reserve has to provide dollar liquidity for allies. So once you let go of the assumption of monetary sovereignty, all of a sudden you understand what Euro dollars are. It very hard to explain to people what Euro dollars are But once you say look anybody can create a dollar This is the old Hyman Minsky quote Like anybody can make money The challenge is getting it accepted Well it turns out that over the course of the late 20th century starting quietly in the 50s and then it becomes this system by the 70s, banks in Europe were marking up their own ledgers with dollars. They were just manufacturing dollars the same way American banks do it. You guys know this story. My point is, once you recognize that the banks just do it on their own and the country's trying to catch up. You end up with this system, I think, far more important than aircraft carriers are swap lines to the dollar. I don't think that the dollar is a product of Pax Americana. I think it is the product of if you have dollars abroad on your balance sheet and you're not an American bank, you're not subject to American regulation, you're not subject to American charters, we've got no control over you whatsoever. However, in a panic, you guys know this, I just want to make the point clear, the Federal Reserve will step in and swap dollars with your central bank. So your central bank can swap them temporarily for you. So that liquidity is, you know, sitting on your balance sheet and you, you can make your own dollars whole again with, with dollar, with American dollars from the Federal Reserve. That to me, doesn't say the fed is the origin of dollars. That to me says anybody can create a dollar. And if you're important enough to the fed, they'll say, you know what? It is a dollar. We're going to make sure that that doesn't blow up. And they always [45:00] For domestic reasons, you know, it affects Americans when the when the global system collapses. But but, yeah, I think the swap lines are the most important diplomacy we do. And you can see that at Jackson Hole, like every Jackson Hole. You know, that picture they take where the chair of the Fed and then whichever central banker happens to be there, they go for this walk. And the photographers know that it's coming. And they're like, like, so we've seen it. So I think of that as the Badgett pageant. Right. Like they're there to prove that they all know each other. The system works. It's stable. And in the next panic, the dollars are coming. I should just say we're recording this on April 22nd. I don't know what's going to happen with various swap lines. But I did see another email come out today from the Council on Foreign Relations saying that they have both updated and upgraded their swap lines tracker. So take that as you will. Wow. I love that map. Okay, but here's like – I guess what I'm trying to understand is like monetary sovereignty, kind of ambiguous term, dollars. They precede the Fed. I get all that. Sure. You've convinced me, et cetera. But when those other banks or countries are in a panic they come to our Fed for our dollars right So what is it about the dollars that we create What is it about American dollars that seem to be special I would take your point from earlier It is an incredibly productive economy still. We've got lots of real things in this economy. I also think we've got pretty good bank regulation. I could ask for better, but we've got pretty decent, we've got stable banks. Nobody else has the pool of federally insured dollars that we have. Europe has got okay banking regulation, but they do not share common deposit insurance. We have that. So I think that the combination of a responsible Fed, reasonable financial regulation, and a massive productive economy means that, yes, of course, the dollars we create here are going to have more meaning. So this is, I think, the key thing, which is that what's happening on the most sort of abstract level when there's a swap or something like that or a currency swap is that there is a transaction happening from foreign-made dollars to American-made dollars. And the reason that American dollars are pretty good or maybe a little bit better than other dollars is because they what they sit on this regulatory regime which was still there despite constant attempts to chip it away I also think that it impossible to compare any other asset in the world to a treasury OK. Almost everything that's on the asset side of the Fed's balance sheet is a treasury. And the American economy is productive and the American federal government is going to continue to have the ability to take in taxes of in-bank dollars, which then give treasuries meaning. There's nothing else comparable to the volume of treasuries, and there's almost nothing else comparable to the security of treasuries. I don't think the Fed is irrelevant. I don't think America is irrelevant. What I'm pointing out is one of the reasons that the dollar is global is because Americans over the course of the 60s and 70s said, go ahead, make your own dollars abroad. We're not going to stop you. They sort of allowed this system to bloom all over the world, and then and only then was the Fed made responsible for those dollars. I'm trying to invert the production of money. The economists started at the Fed. It starts everywhere. And I think that central banks, we have central banks because we need them. Because banks are so important, we need our own big bank to do a job for us. The original goal, the charter of the Bank of England, its original purpose was to carry on the war against France. That all it was supposed to do The central bank is just a big bank that does what we need it to do And so in this case the Federal Reserve is doing a thing that we think is diplomatically important Do you think is there anything to the part of the MMT story in your view in which taxes help create the demand for a currency and thus give it some element of moneyness Here's where that falls apart for me. We have so many forms of dollars that we have to be specific about what we're actually taxing and what we're actually spending. And what the United States is actually spending out of the Treasury General account is bank dollars. Those dollars were created in commercial banks. They were taxed in or they were bought in. I can hear MMTs right now, just the heads exploding everywhere. But I really believe this. And when you look at the accounting, it's very clear. The Treasury, the Treasury General account of the Fed, you know, takes in money through taxes and it takes in money when it sells treasuries and then it spends it back out of the economy. So it's specifically bank dollars that have meaning. So, yeah, it has meaning that you have to pay your American taxes and American bank dollars. But those bank dollars don't just have meaning because they're taxing in bank dollars. They have meaning for all the other reasons that we've talked about. All the bank regulations, the federal deposit insurance, country music, all of it like are what give the dollar value. So I think this idea that you're just, and this, by the way, so people who believe in this theory of money really like to point to [50:00] colonial monies. So most of the colonies, eventually all of them, had their own forms of paper money. And they did, in fact, print them up, and they did, in fact, tax them back out. However, they also all had a sinking fund, which was basically, it was a promise to take in silver and gold in tolls and port duties at their various ports, and then from time to time, sink those dollars, buy them back with silver and gold. There was a coin sitting on the edge of this. This was true in New York. This is true in New Jersey. This is true in Pennsylvania. This is true in Maryland. And so to just say they printed these dollars up and they made sure they were counterfeitable and they wrote on the back, tis death to counterfeit. That came from the Benjamin Franklin shillings. If I ever get a tattoo, that's the tattoo. And then tax them back in. You know, there's a lot of work being done. And the dominant theory of that among historians is it was given money. It was given value because you had to tax it back in. The problem is, in order to believe that, you have to ignore the infrastructure that they put in place of the sinking fund to make that money have value. And you have to assume they didn't know what they were doing. This is my frustration with economic history. It often assumes that people in the past didn't know what they were doing with money. Right, they just sort of stumbled into it. They do way more than we know. Like I spent a lot of time reading the Maryland Gazette from the 18th century They were talking about discount rates They were talking about bills of exchange on London They were talking about you would regularly get the value of stock in the Bank of England It was like reading an analyst often. They were really sophisticated. They really understood how money works. How fun was it to write this book? Because we sort of touched on it earlier, but you got to go to all these archives. You got to go in, I think you said, a Czechoslovakian cave or something. I did. I'm going to tell you how much fun it was, and then I'm going to hope that my wife never hears this because I think I complain constantly over the writing of this book. I love being in archives, and I love being in libraries. And one thing that I learned how to do that I'm going to do for the rest of my career is read letters as history. And they often get ignored. You know, people like to read letters, but people kept their financial documents. And I think that you actually have less of a reliable narrator problem when you're looking at financial records because they had to keep them accurately. You can lie in a letter in a way that you cannot lie on a ledger. And so you can read ledgers from the 19th century. I have this sort of full history of the career of a man who moved from New Jersey in the 1830s to New Orleans and he sold carriages. And sort of we know how money worked because he sold. And then we sort of know how we I think he had advance notice of the panic of 1837 because he seems to have cashed in He seems to have pulled a lot of cash out right before the panic like he knew what was going on And then you know and then you can see how he decided that he wanted to be a sugar planner and how he made that financial transition And then exactly how money worked for him once he was on a sugar plantation. No cash at all. Everything was on paper. He sold sugar to his factor. You can read all these documents. In New Orleans, the factor kept a running account with him. If he wanted to buy something in New Orleans, he would write a letter to the factor, and the factor would send something back up and just subtract it from his account. He didn't have any physical cash. And when he wanted to do something, actually in St. James Parish where he was, he would write promissory notes. Those promissory notes would circle. He's got all the signatures on the back. So for me, what I now love to do, weirdly, is read old ledgers because it's like watching a movie. It's like running the tape back of exactly what somebody did, sometimes hour by hour by hour during their day. when you get a sense of their commercial life, you also get a sense of their life. And you can see these actions they're taking point by point that I mean, and there are amazing stories. I chased a story about this guy. He had a promissory note go bad. So we had to take it to New Orleans notary. And then the notary had to go find the guy who had written the promissory note. It turns out he wasn't at his house anymore because his wife had kicked him out and he was living in a stable and they tracked him down at the stable This is all in the notarial records while they trying to like And then it turns out that he eventually stole a horse and left New Orleans And then he had to go on a massive road trip and track him down Right. No, unfortunately, then that then I'd have a movie script. Unfortunately, you don't have that would be amazing. I would. Yeah. Is this what you learn in school? Like when you study to be a historian? No, but do you learn like the techniques of archival research? Because I wouldn't know the first thing of like how to even like find. I mean, these days I would just probably Google or Chad GPT what archival library might have this information. Maybe I'd start my search there or something like that. But when they talk in the academic setting about training to be a historian, are these sort of like the craft of the trade that you learn? Like how do you learn how to identify the library and get to know where in the library to look and which stacks to look into? So that's a really important question, and the answer is not what you think it is. Okay. They do not teach you how to do that. Oh, I just assume that's it. You read a lot of secondary literature. You read a lot of theory. You do a lot of historiography. So, you know, you'll take a course as a graduate student and you'll sort of – you'll look at all the different ways that people have seen the same period. The archives, it's a little weird. It's like, you know, the cliché of some societies where – [55:00] When a child is ready to be an adult, they send them out into the woods. They got to live on their own and they just got to figure it out. Good luck to you, kid. Try to kill a wolf and come home. That's a little bit what it's like in the archives. I kept on asking, like, how do I do this? And they're like, go figure it out. Really? And so you do kind of figure it out. I have ways of going into the archives now and recording things. I'm much better at it than I used to be. There are a couple of things I know, like I now always bring food in the bag to the archive because an archive is often sort of not near a good source of food. So you have to have some sort of protein bar in your bag. Wait, but one thing I know about the archives, they don't let you eat in the archives. Well, not in the archives. Right, okay. But you have to figure it out on your own. You know, I looked at a lot of bank records in New Orleans, and the records of the Citizens Bank in New Orleans were literally underwater during Katrina. Jones Hall at Tulane University flooded, and so they did this amazing thing where very quickly they recovered them. They got them out of the water, and they irradiated them to kill anything. But I've talked to other people who've looked in those archives and you get sick flipping through them. You feel gross after two days of doing that because I think there's bad stuff in those pages. Some of the pages are stuck together. So you know the archive itself is this living thing you know which and also there are lots of theories about the about what gets kept and what doesn When you in an archive you have this idea that like this is the record of what happened Nope It the record of what was decided to be kept That exactly right And so often you know I looked at I sort of constructed sort of a brief story about an enslaved woman in St. James Parish based on some promissory notes that sent her around the parish from one plantation to another. You can sort of, you have to, nobody kept those records on purpose so that we could get her story, but it's possible to read, they call it reading between the archives. So you have to do a lot of that work. I really think that, I almost don't want to say it out loud. I think that ledgers are an incredibly underused resource. They give us a picture. I was in London last month and I found the complete financial records of John Locke. It wasn't this like big archival discovery. They're there, they're in the catalog, but nobody looks at them. I can tell you exactly how he paid for everything. And for a man who didn't believe that credit was a good form of money, He sure seemed to use a lot of credit. All right, Brendan Greeley, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. The book is The Almighty Dollar, 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money. Thank you. Joe that was a lot of fun It was such a a great obviously and the book is really really interesting and it's full of that like archival detail that really comes through one thing that stood out for me from that conversation again it's sort of going back to that point of like the dollar is not fully under the u.s government's control right and there are times when there are other entities out there who can create their own dollars, as Brendan was describing, at which point it does become an obligation on the United States to support those dollars. And it can become another political tool, but it's still a constraint in many ways. Okay. So, you know, I have, because we've done several episodes, including our series on the history of Eurodollars, like the idea that foreign banks can manufacture dollars, that I sort of can understand. But it actually really deepens my understanding of it further to get the idea that, well, actually, long before there was a United States, there was the decentralized manufacturing of dollars. Right. Which I hadn't really thought about that or even really known about that aspect before. But that dollars is this thing that had decentralized manufacturing for a long time I guess the one thing that I had sort of understood so William Jennings Bryan gave the famous cross of gold speech in which he argued that we should have bimetalist, I think it was a bimetalist, or that we should have silver. And I remember there being like, my understanding of historical monetary is not that strong, but I knew this thing that was like independent mints could like mint silver dollars at times because there was a lot of silver, or the more inflationary the farmers wanted or something like that. So I guess I sort of did know that the literal production of dollars had always been this sort of decentralized thing. Sort of diffused, yeah. But I had not quite appreciated how far that went back. Yeah. The urge to make dollars is inescapably human, I think. Everyone wants to make their own money in some form or another, whether it's just a simple barter system or like a ledger of credit that you keep track of. It's just so interesting that there was this thing called dollars. You know, it's like a standard, right? Yeah. It was almost like the dollar was a sort of common standard that anyone could, you know, it's like anyone could make a CD that fits on a CD player. It had a good user interface and a network effect. Yeah. It could be that one day – [60:00] U.S. global hegemony has long gone, and people talk about America is just like this thing in the history books. This used to be a great power, and blah, blah, blah. And everyone still uses the dollar. The dollar still exists. Yeah, it's pretty good. Totally. It's a good currency. Okay. All right, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. Okay, this has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Brendan Greeley. He's at BH Greeley. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots. And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about what money actually is, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. Thank you will show up just right, right on time. Explore more at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. The U.S. Virgin Islands invites you to explore the stunning islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. USVI is truly a one-of-a-kind destination with mouth-watering food, the warmest hospitality from the locals, vibrant culture, and pristine beaches. USVI has everything you're looking for in a getaway. And the best part? No passport is required when traveling from the U.S. Go to visitusvi.com to start planning your next vacation. That's visitusvi.com. USVI, naturally in rhythm. Next week on Leaders with me, Francine Lacqua. I speak with investor and entrepreneur Amanda Stavely on the boldest deal of her career. That was ballsy. That was brave. Walking away from Newcastle. It was the toughest decision I've made. And what she's looking for in her next football club. I just want a challenge. And that's what excites me. Listen and watch Leaders with me, Francine Lacqua, on Bloomberg Television or wherever you get your podcasts.