Autorentext

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 honors in German. He is currently completing a PhD in financial history at Princeton University.

Klappentext

In this ambitious and groundbreaking history of the dollar, financial journalist and economic scholar Brendan Greeley makes a new argument about the origins of our money—and the people and nations who have surrendered to it.

“Eye-opening, educational, exhaustively reported, and very fun to read.”—Foreign Policy

America’s money is global money—nearly every nation in the world writes international contracts in dollars, and in 2023, central banks around the world held nearly $6.7 trillion in dollar reserves, three times any other currency. Today, the United States’ global hegemony rests largely on its ability to produce unlimited treasury bonds that are sold around the world, dollars that supported America’s explosive growth in the twentieth century and funded its massive wars in the twenty-first. American power and the American dollar have become synonymous.

Yet in this brilliant 500-year history, Brendan Greeley argues that America’s sovereignty over the dollar is an illusion—that the dollar had already empowered and destroyed nations long before it washed up on colonial shores, and that no country or king has or can ever truly control it. Reaching back to the dollar’s birth as the taler in the 15th-century silver mines of St. Joachimsthal, Greeley reveals how the dollar first thrived as a commodity for merchants and bankers—a big, silver coin that was trusted around the world, even as the miners who pulled it from the ground had trouble getting paid in that same silver. Greeley traces a captivatingly complex path across time and place, from the industrial collapse at the heart of Spain’s 17th-century silver empire, to the birth of American paper dollars in colonial Maryland, 19th-century New Orleans bank failures, and the small town of Hawarden, Iowa, which created its own dollars during the Great Depression. At every surprising turn, Greeley upends assumptions about global currencies and draws out the centuries-old tension between how dollars are manufactured and whom they actually serve.

Singular in its breadth, The Almighty Dollar dismantles the myth that America created or has ever truly controlled the dollar. Through meticulous research and vividly rendered stories of merchants, monarchs, and everyday people both past and present, Greeley shows how the dollar became America’s greatest export, spawning a vast financial industry that enriches the wealthy, even as the rest of the country’s industries suffer.

Leseprobe
1

A Big Silver Coin from Bohemia

St. Joachimsthal, 1518

The party at the birth of the dollar

On the Feast of Epiphany in January 1518, silver miners in the town of Konradsgrün in the mountains of northern Bohemia threw a party. Things got out of hand. By the end of the night, they had lit their empty beer kegs on fire, hauled them up on their shoulders, and run with them down the street, screaming and singing.

We know exactly where they ran, because at the time Konradsgrün had only one street. Every single one of the town’s three thousand inhabitants had arrived within the previous two years. They lived in about four hundred shacks, perched on a hillside too steep to walk without switchbacks, overlooking a valley narrow enough for a crossbow bolt to reach the other side. The street ran from a chapel, north along the mountain, to a small green—the Grün from the town’s name. At the start of the sixteenth century, the Ore Mountains that divided Bohemia and Saxony were still socked in with virgin forest. In the town’s first few years, bears would sometimes still trot over the green.

It’s possible that the miners set the kegs on fire at the end of the night because they’d run out of beer. At the time, Konradsgrün didn’t yet have a license for its own brewery, and beer had to be hauled in from Schlackenwerth, a town about an hour’s walk away. Schlackenwerth was also the seat of Stephan Schlick, a minor Bohemian nobleman who had claimed the earth around the brand-new mines. The land wasn’t his to claim. He shared the title of count with several other members of his extended family; they all had a claim to the same land. But Stephan Schlick had just brazenly decided he should be lord of the valley, then started acting as if he were.

We do have a good idea of what the party in January 1518 was about. I have found two mentions of the event. One says only that a new captain of the mountain, Heinrich von Könneritz, was “festively installed” on the Feast of Epiphany in 1518. The other describes a christening party, to give the town a new name.

The party marked a temporary victory for the miners in a long fight with Schlick. His title as lord was questionable to begin with, but he was also just bad at it. In the summer of 1517, the miners at Konradsgrün had downed tools over work conditions and threatened to walk out of the valley. Schlick had agreed to a list of demands, among them a requirement to pay the miners with higher-quality silver coins. The miners had also demanded that they give the town a new name of their choosing. The morning after the party, the miners woke up, hungover and likely singed, in a town called St. Joachimsthal—the Valley of Saint Joachim. The silver coins that came out of the valley would become known as joachimsthaler, and then simply thaler or taler.

By the early 1530s, the kingdom of Sweden would begin producing a big silver coin called a jockumsdaler, and the kingdom of Denmark would mint a Jochemdaler, both copies of the same big silver coins that came out of St. Joachimsthal and both named for the town itself, the start of a centuries-long process of copies of copies of copies of the same silver coin. Today the U.S. Mint still makes a coin it calls a silver dollar, with almost the exact same dimensions as the ones that came out of the mint at Joachimsthal. If you were ever given a silver dollar as a child for your birthday, you held in your little palm a direct descendant of that christening party in the mountains in Bohemia in 1518.

The mining town of St. Joachimsthal often shows up in histories of the dollar as the origin of the name itself. Over time the German word taler became, in English, “dollar.” But those histories suggest that what happened at the actual mine in the valley is now irrelevant. They argue that a domestic currency simply became international: Count Schlick had so much silver that the coins of his own realm spread beyond his own borders. But nothing in that sentence about Schlick is really true. Stephan was only one of several Counts Schlick, an ambitious huckster without a clear claim on anything in the valley. In the sixteenth century, St. Joachimsthal was the single most productive silver mine in Europe, but it wasn’t completely out of proportion with the other mines. The big silver joachimsthaler coins that came out of the valley were never meant as local currency. They were far more useful for trade across the Baltic than they were for making payments in a tiny corner …