What is a dollar? What is money? These are not questions I thought I would find myself facing after half a century of use and careless neglect. (Also, I am told that I cover economics.) I thought I knew what a dollar was, and boy was I wrong.
The story of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Moneyby historian and journalist Brendan Greeley, it is eye-opening, informative, thoroughly reported, and a joy to read. And I know that because I read it twice, having lost my notes from the first reading, as often happens.
What is a dollar? What is money? These are not questions I thought I would find myself facing after half a century of use and careless neglect. (Also, I am told that I cover economics.) I thought I knew what a dollar was, and boy was I wrong.
The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful MoneyBrendan Greeley, Crown Coinage, 432 pp., $32, May 2026
The story of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Moneyby historian and journalist Brendan Greeley, it is eye-opening, informative, thoroughly reported, and a joy to read. And I know that because I read it twice, having lost my notes from the first reading, as often happens.
Here’s the first thing to know: The United States did not invent the dollar, as the “500 years” in the quotation may have been given. The second thing is that, even today, the United States does not completely control the dollar, whatever it was, or will be. Like the heavy silver coins that came before it, and gave the coin its name, ”
Greeley spent years on Financial Times covering the US Federal Reserve and writing about monetary policy, as a layman, until he was seized with the idea of tracing the origin of the dollar. In a sign that even Greeley secretly hates the dollar, he is now a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton.
Everyone knows what a dollar is, unless they don’t, and that’s why Greeley found himself delving into 16th-century silver mines in the modern-day Czech Republic, pestering Spanish historians about the flow of money in 17th-century Toledo, and pestering the good folks in Iowa to talk about “spending money” on a grand scale – the local silver dance.
However, as Greeley discovers, it was on the streets in Bohemia that a drunken party in the early 16th century revealed something fundamental about how money is made, how it works, and who it works for. “Things went awry. By the end of the night, they had lit their beer kegs on fire, hoisted them over their shoulders, and ran down the street with them, screaming and singing,” he writes. One of the things that the drunken miners were celebrating, besides better pay, was the change of name of their new town to St. Joachimsthal. The story continues from there, and I won’t spoil it, except to say that a joachimsthalera high-quality silver coin minted and minted in the 1520s in what is now the Czech Republic, is actually the origin of the dollar.
Initial cash vendors they were quickly copied by other countries and kingdoms, on almost the same terms (25 grams of pure silver, more or less). And there is much to enjoy on the journey from Saxon miners in the early 1500s to the silver mines of Bolivia later that century to the greenbacks in the wallet today.
For centuries, the most important money in the world was not the building of empires or kingdoms. The Habsburg Empire did not embrace the coinage that began in its Central European empires. Of course, a century later, a flood of silver destroyed Hapsburg Spain, but the Spanish silver pieces of the eighth (the actual eighth) were doomsday criminals and global currency for centuries. They were known as dollars, and the American colonists kept their books in dollars even when paying bills in pounds and shillings. When colonial officials tried to engage in temporary currency, as in Maryland in the 1760s, bills were denominated in dollars.
What made the thaler, or he speaksor the interesting and valuable dollar was not that it came from the kingdom or the royal mint; quite the opposite. All of the early 1520s coins that made the world go round were minted and minted outside of any national currency system. The reason it was in such demand is the reason for the US dollar today: It was plentiful, predictable, and backed by something people believed in. (As Greeley writes, “They were universally important because there were so many of them in the world.”)
In the old days, that was silver, like the original thaler and Spanish pieces of eight. Later, after the gold rush, the bottom support became gold, which angered miners in the American West and William Jennings Bryan, who did not want to be crucified on a gold cross. After 1873, silver no longer supported the dollar, as it had for the previous three centuries; after 1933, gold did not. But the same stability and purity that defined those early coins from the Bohemian mines kept the US dollar afloat, even when stripped of any precious metals, as President Richard Nixon learned in 1971.
The US dollar was not exclusive to the US Mint, or the Federal Reserve, or any of the places we associate with the greenback. Indeed, dollars are still made outside the empire, and Greeley shows how banks, in the United States and abroad, create dollars out of thin air. For example, American bankers and policymakers discovered in the late 1950s that Europeans were creating their own copies of the thaler in the form of eurodollars. That is to say: European banks were creating dollars outside and beyond the perspective of the US monetary system. Not like fake people, but like clever bankers.
There were many technical reasons the eurodollar market increased that are related to interest rates, but to steal a line from Greeley himself, “You don’t have time, and I don’t have the common sense to explain.” However, the market emphasized a fundamental truth: The Empire, in whatever form it wore, was never an independent entity.
“Money is still today a fierce, never-ending, international competition, with different assets moving across borders to be used as money without the slightest regard for freedom,” Greeley writes. That was as true for the Holy Roman Emperors as it was for Spanish merchants or American cotton merchants in New Orleans.
“The dollar is not America’s currency. It works for the world — for now. But it doesn’t always work for America,” Greeley writes. Often, especially under the gold standard, but even then, the US dollar has not served ordinary Americans as much as it has international trade. The debate over Wall Street versus Main Street bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis was the latest manifestation of a centuries-old pattern.
Greeley never enters the future of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and he makes little mention of cryptocurrency, except to note that it shares many characteristics with past ad-hoc money creations that served a purpose for a while, until they didn’t.
That’s not bad. The number of words written about the supposedly doomed fate of the US dollar certainly exceeds the number of US dollars in circulation, and yet those dollars are still circulating, often even legally. The less said about crypto, the better.
What’s interesting about this book, other than Greeley’s unquenchable joy in playing heavy silver coins on tabletops, is learning exactly how the thing that makes the world go round was made, and made, and went around.
Maybe I’ll read it a third time.
