Brendan Greeley — The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money

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 his 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. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Brendan is a PhD student in the Department of History at Princeton specializing in the history of money and finance, particularly in the early-modern Atlantic world. His research focuses on how different kinds of high-powered and petty money circulated in the same markets, how the production and regulation of money affected economic inequality, and on how early-modern flows of African, Brazilian and Andean gold and silver changed economic thought. He is writing a history of the dollar for Penguin Random House. Prior to Princeton, Brendan spent 20 years was 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 in 2012. Brendan graduated from Tulane University with honors in German in 1997.