Brendan Greeley

@bhgreeley.bsky.social

7583 Followers 3716 Following

PhD candidate in the history of finance at Princeton and a contributing editor at the Financial Times. The Almighty Dollar from Crown Currency available May 19! https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634502/the-almighty-dollar-by-brendan-greeley/

It's a lumpy grey New Balance sneaker
Page of a book on Korean barbecue
A 6x6 stack of milk crates full of library books
Picture of a Kaypro II with TWO COUNT THEM TWO FLOPPY DRIVES
Archival photo of a New York three-dollar bill from 1775
A check drawn on the Bank of Noeth America in 1792
Not every book can be about every thing. If I don't write about the thing you're interested in, it's not that I don't think it's important, it's that the world is vast, beautiful, weird, and hard for any one person to describe in full.
Text from a WSJ article in which the U.S. Marine Band plays "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC at Trump's UFC extravaganza
"The venture works through depositary receipts—or securities that allow investors to buy stakes in foreign companies—that are authorized and tokenized. Citi will issue those securities and act as a custodian for them."
A scam book marketing email purporting to come from Mitch Albom
Me, in front of a restaurant called “Fiat Cafe”
A silver coin in a collection box, as described in the main text
Photograph of a Roman coin with a dog on the obverse
An Amazon review of a book with the headline “Worth the read… sort of.”
An unfinished Lego Colosseum on the sidewalk
The story of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money, by historian and journalist Brendan Greeley, is eye-opening, educational, exhaustively reported, and very fun to read. And I know that because I read it twice, after I misplaced my notes from the first reading, as often happens.
"Brimming with startling details, this is also serious financial history with a conclusion riper for our unsettled times: Rulers and borders come and go, but the dollar has outlasted our illusions of sovereignty and control." - Evan Osnos
A screen grab of a tweet from Joe Weisenthal of Odd Lots, recommending The Almighty Dollar
A screen grab from Amazon showing The Almighty Dollar at 875th among all books and at #1 in several categories
Steak frites at PJ Clarke’s
Amazon rankings showing the book at #1!!!! (Ok: in economic policy and monetary policy)
A clear-eyed understanding of a global dollar that has always benefited some at the expense of others - Seth Rockman
DSCR loans made up roughly a fifth of new mortgages on single-family rental properties nationwide in 2024
Comment that suggests the article doesn’t read for an American audience.
A search result for my own damn book in which Google informs me "You visit often."
A printed dollar note from the town of Hawarden, Iowa, issued in the early years of the Great Depression
"The origins of the word "eurodollar" are even more complicated than this, but if the author had chased every interesting question into the hills, he would nave never finished this book, and you would not not be reading it. he barely finished as it is."
An end note which includes "The aiuthor feels compelled to mention that he once worked as a crew member on a boat where Evan Galbraith was a frequent guest, but didn't understand what Galbraith actually did for a living until decades later, when the name popped up in research for this book."
Four current books about the dollar, all in a row
In 2011 researchers at the Bank of En­ gland published a paper that journalists and academics still pass around like samizdat. The paper ar- gued that the old story about the base money and the money multiplier had gotten it exactly backward. Commercial banks manufacture money, on their own—­ almost all of the money we actually use. A license to print money exists. It’s a bank charter. Bankers understand this, though as practitioners they don’t often talk about their work as a theory of money. To see how a loan produces new money, though, it helps to think like a banker, using a diagram we call a T chart.
A diagram, describing how banks manufacture brand-new dollars when they make a loan
A text message that reads "You should start a Weezer cover band called Geezer"
The British-born cryptography enthusiast is also alleged to be British and interested in cryptography
Writing tip #4: As I write a book, I bury myself in a brilliant work of fiction about the same time period, to fill my mind with its literary power. Example: as I wrote *The Fearless Benjamin Lay* I read Barry Unsworth's *Sacred Hunger* (for the fifth or sixth time).
"Brimming with startling details, this is also serious financial history with a conclusion ripe for our unsettled times: Rulers and borders come and go, abut the dollar has outlasted our illusions of sovereignty and control." - Evan Osnos, New York Times bestselling author of The Haves and Have-Yachts
A description of a bro who uses AI to place short-term crypto bets
Is it possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver? Apparently, yes.
A brass plaque for night service, inviting you to push a button and speak through a tube
A comment on the podcast that reads "Why does this dork think he is witty?"
A handwritten page in an old ledger that begins “to all whom” and then abruptly ends
A quote from Shakespeare on the dollar, from the introduction to the book "The Almighty Dollar"
Menu item for a wagyu croissant smash burger, which is as amazing as it sounds!
"Brimming with startling details, this is also serious financial history with a conclusion ripe for our unsettled times: Rulers and borders come and go, but the dollar has outlasted our illusions of sovereignty and control." - Evan Osnos, author of The Haves and the Have-Yachts
A stack of galley copies of The Almighty Dollar, due out from Penguin Random House on May 19th, 2026!