Macro Hive Conversations With Bilal Hafeez
Macro Hive Conversations With Bilal Hafeez

Ep. 367: Brendan Greeley on The Almighty Dollar, 500 Years of History, and the Eurodollar Market

July 17, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Dollar Was Never Just American

Brendan Greeley spent seven years writing The Almighty Dollar and ended up with a book that surprised even him. He had planned to start in 1971, at the end of the gold standard. But every time he pulled on a thread—why the dollar still had value after Nixon closed the gold window, why the Fed was created in 1913, why American money is called "dollar" at all—he found himself pushed further back. By the time he was done, he had traced the coin's origins to a silver mine in Bohemia that began operating around 1517. "I didn't do this on purpose," he says. "I wish I could tell you that I were smart enough to know that this was going on."

The Ancient Dollar Was Born Outside Any Nation

The word "dollar" comes from Joachimsthal, a valley in Bohemia. Coins minted there became known as Joachimsthaler, shortened in German to taler, then in Dutch to daalder, and in English to dollar. But Greeley insists this is not just a word history. It is the history of a specific coin that was international from the start.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:43) **Guest Introduction and Book Surprise** - Bilal Hafeez introduces Brendan Greeley and explains how his book *The Almighty Dollar* was not what he expected, covering 500 years of history rather than just recent decades.
  • 2 (06:31) **Origin of the "Ancient Dollar" Coin** - Greeley traces the dollar's origin to a Bohemian valley called Joachimsthal, where a coin called the Joachimsthaler became an international currency.
  • 3 (11:03) **The Spanish Takeover and American Adoption** - By the time of American colonization, the Spanish had adopted this coin format for their silver from Bolivia, and it became the dominant Atlantic trade coin.
  • 4 (13:27) **Colonial Currency Chaos and Sophistication** - The American colonies had overlapping currency systems, not a single unified money, and citizens understood money far better than modern people do.
  • 5 (18:14) **State vs. Federal Control of Money** - The Constitution forbade states from printing their own bills of credit, shifting money creation from democratic local assemblies to privately chartered banks.
  • 6 (23:50) **Bank Failures as the Mother of Regulation** - Every major financial crash from 1819 to 1932 inspired a regulatory innovation we now take for granted.
  • 7 (27:06) **The Civil War's Real Impact** - The Civil War nationalized currency not through greenbacks (fiat money) but by taxing state bank notes out of existence and creating national bank charters.

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Guests on this episode

Brendan Greeley

Show Notes

Brendan Greeley has spent twenty years as a journalist, covering economic and monetary policy. He was the US economics editor at the Financial Times and continues to write a regular column there. Before that, he was a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist, as well as an anchor and correspondent for Bloomberg TV. He has also written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal Europe, and received a New York Press Club Award for special event reporting. Brendan graduated from Tulane University with honours in German. He is currently completing a PhD in financial history at Princeton University. In this podcast, we discuss:

  1. The "Ancient Dollar's" Bohemian Roots
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