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Brendan Greeley

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2026-05-28
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2026-05-28
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  1. “That's exactly right. And so often, you know, I looked at, I sort of constructed. 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 have to, that nobody kept those records on purpose so that we could get her story, but it's possible to, 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,”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “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 the archive itself is this living thing. And also there are lots of theories about what gets kept and what doesn't. You're in an archive, you have this idea that this is the record of what happened. Nope, it's the record”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “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 look at all the different ways that people have seen the same period. The archives, it's a little weird. It's like the cliche of some societies where 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. 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 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “He sold sugar to his factor. You can read all these documents in New Orleans. The factor kept for running account with him. If you wanted to buy something in New Orleans, he would write a letter to the factor. 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. We've got all the signatures on the back. So for me, what I now love to do weirdly is read old ledgers. Because 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 he had to take it to uh 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 note”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And they often get ignored. 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 I think he had advanced 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 planter 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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 complained constantly over the writing of this book. I love being an 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 Ledger's history.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “They knew way more than we know. Like, I've 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. Like, it was like reading an analyst often. They were really sophisticated. They really understood how money worked.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “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 Jersey, this is true in Pennsylvania, this 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 Shellings. If I ever get a tattoo, that's the tattoo.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Where that falls apart for me. 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. 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. You look at the accounting, it's very clear. The Treasury General account of the Fed takes in money through taxes and it takes in money when it sells treasuries, and then it spends it back out into the economy. So it's specifically bank dollars that have meaning.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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 economist 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's 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “They sit on this regulatory regime, which was still there despite constant attempts to chip it away. I also think that it's impossible to compare any other asset in the world to a treasury. 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 in bank dollars, which then give treasuries meaning. It's just like 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”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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. I think that the combination of 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. I don't want to complain.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So I think of that as the badget pageant. 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”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “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 say it for domestic reasons. You know, it affects Americans when the global system collapses. But yeah, I think the whop 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...”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “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 can make your own dollars whole again with American dollars from the Federal Reserve.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So once you let go of the assumption of monetary sovereignty, all of a sudden you understand what euro dollars are. It's 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. Anybody can make money challenges 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “But I want to come back to Because you and I have the same history of encountering MMT at the same time. And wrestling with it and trying to figure out, does it make sense? Does it not make sense? And this is where I am right now is at the end of that long process of wrestling with that. We'll get to that”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “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 necessary 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “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 a constitution, we took, 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “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't think they had to, by the way. We tend to assume that this was a good thing, that they were 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That's not the way they thought about it at the time. There was 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But the details of that system, I think we should not be scared of those details. 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's better to have a central bank. But it's not as if dollars were completely valueless. And I think historically, we run into a problem because we're not precise about what backing is. I think we think now that backing is just gold or silver.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “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've got a central bank and it's fiat, and the central bank produces M0. It's 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 2 o'clock in the morning going, who knows, man.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “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. 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. We had Manku at Tulin University in 1995. It hasn't changed from recent versions of the Manku textbook.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So now, to Tracy's question, what you start to see in China is not just Cobbs showing up in hoards. These are, you know, every once in a while during construction, someone will find a box of coins. And 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... One silver, one coin, it's going everywhere.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “One thing that happens is you get high quality mints in Mexico City and in Potoc. 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 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 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 hoards in China. So Cobbs had been showing up in China for the, you know, the Chinese, again, are absorbing all this silver in the world, no matter where it's coming from, is headed for China because it's buying porcelain and silk.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Exactly. So the dog dog, 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “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 produced 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 that's dog dollar.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “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 if 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 awful rewards and won ads for dollars. Colonies are fighting each other with currency development to try and track the dollar onto their shores. So this is by far the dominant form of money, not just in the colonies, but globally.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So 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 valuations 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “That's exactly why. Yeah. So pieces of eight that we know from pirate movies, right? That's what that was. The pirate movies piece of eight is named because the Occams Taller with the dominant form of silver and Spain had to copy it.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “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 Jachem's So Spain starts cree”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “In the Tempest, and again in the Scottish play, they talk about dollars. It's 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. Already this story of sovereignty and this story of the fungibility of money starts to break apart. You've got this coin that's copied again and again. Okay, so the Spanish have silver in what is now Bolivia and Mexico. They figure out this unbelievable brutal regime, the Mita 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 ore into silver. The thing is, Charles V of Castile, Holy Roman Emperor, Lord of all he surveys.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Head is exploding in real time. Listen, we should mint Weisenthaler. Yes, see what happens. Yeah, yeah. 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Doesn't so that gets shortened to taller. And then in Dutch, they also start. Yes. Yes, you were from some talk. I'm watching Joe's”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Because, 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, right? 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. 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 Jachemstal. All these coins come to be referred to as Jachem's Taller, coins from Jachem's Tall. And then that's exactly.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Dividend in silver form, what they expected. So, this is an early form of joint stock company. Friedrich Engels actually believed that this was the origin of the joint stock company, these silver mines. They're 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 Voral 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 Saxon silver investors that the miners revolted, actually. So they struck twice and then they finally sacked the town.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yes, absolutely. What you have then in this Bohemian Valley is Saxon investors coming south, Saxon miners coming south, Bohemian count who doesn't 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 Bohemia. This was paying back silver investors. It went straight away.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, a little copper corn. 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 you 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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “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 Cipola 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 therefore international trade and merchants and the wealthy. Little money is for low value trade and it's for purchases of meat and bread and labor.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “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.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Let's see if I could do this in a way that I don't run out of time. Okay. The dollar wasn't supposed to be money. There is a story, it is told in histories of the dollar that there was a count in Bohemia's 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't 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 Saxony and he got Saxon mining investors and Saxon miners. And they started pulling silver out of the ground. So this is already outside of...”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “The problem with saying that it's fiat means that we fail to understand how important all these regulations are before federally insurance. In the 1920s, there were about 200.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Currency, follow the Panic of 1837. We slowly figured out how to make sure that banks don't 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's, 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's on board”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Think once, man, I'm going to embarrass myself if 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. If you get a check from your employer and you don't have a bank account, you got to go to a check casher. All of a sudden, that's a different kind of dollar because it doesn't clear a par because you got to do a disc, you got to take a discount at the check cashier. Okay, 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 introduce new regulations, new way of reporting what's on the bank ledgers, the idea of a controller.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “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. I have not completed the list yet.”

    2026-05-28 · Odd Lots · Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source