Brendan Greeley’s ‘The Almighty Dollar’ Review: The U.S. Dollar Isn’t Really America’s Currency

What is a dollar? What even is money? These are not questions I thought I would find myself grappling with after half a century of spending with reckless abandon. (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 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.

What is a dollar? What even is money? These are not questions I thought I would find myself grappling with after half a century of spending with reckless abandon. (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 Money, Brendan Greeley, Crown Currency, 432 pp., $32, May 2026

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.

Here’s the first thing to know: The United States did not invent the dollar, as the “500 years” in the subtitle may have given away. The second thing is that, even today, the United States does not really control the dollar, whatever that is, was, or will be. Like the heavy silver coins that came before it, and lent the currency its name, “[t]he dollar was an accident,” Greeley writes.

Greeley spent years at the Financial Times covering the U.S. Federal Reserve and writing about monetary policy, like a normal person, until he was seized with the idea of tracking down the origins of the dollar. In a sign that even Greeley secretly hates dollars, he is now a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton. 

Everybody knows just what a dollar is, except they don’t, really, and that is why Greeley found himself venturing into 16th-century silver mine shafts in modern day Czechia, pestering Spanish numismatic historians about silver flows in 17th-century Toledo, and bothering nice people in Iowa to talk about “scrip” currency—basically, monopoly money used locally—during the Great Depression.

Yet, as Greeley discovers, it was on a street in Bohemia where a drunken revel in the early 16th century revealed something fundamental about the way money is made, and how it works, and who it works for. “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,” he writes. One of the things the drunken miners were celebrating, beyond better pay, was a change in the name of their new town to St. Joachimsthal. The story goes on from there, and I won’t spoil it, except to say that a joachimsthaler, a high-quality silver coin mined and minted in the 1520s in what is now Czechia, is in fact the origin of the dollar. 

The original silver thalers were quickly copied by other countries and other kingdoms, on almost the exact 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 Bolivian silver mines later that century to the greenbacks in wallets today.

For centuries on end, the most important money in the world was not a construct of kingdoms or empires. The Habsburg empire didn’t embrace the silver thaler that began in its Central European dominions. As a matter of fact, a century later, the flood of silver wrecked Hapsburg Spain, but Spanish silver pieces of eight (reales de a ocho) were a latter-day thaler and the global currency for centuries. They were known as dollars, and American colonists did their books in dollars even while settling accounts in pounds and shillings. When colonial officials scrimped to make do with temporary currency, as in Maryland in the 1760s, the bills were naturally denominated in dollars.

What made the thaler, or taler, or dollar interesting and valuable was not that it came from a kingdom or a royal mint; quite the contrary. All the early coins from the 1520s on that made the world go around were mined and minted outside any national system of currency. The reason they were in such demand is the same reason U.S. dollars are today: They were plentiful, predictable, and backed by something people trust. (As Greeley writes, “They were useful all over the world because there were a lot of them out in the world.”)

In the old days, that was silver, like the original thaler and Spanish pieces of eight. Later, after some gold rushes, the bottom backing became gold, much to the chagrin of miners in the U.S. West and William Jennings Bryan, who did not want to be crucified on a cross of gold. After 1873, silver no longer backed the dollar, as it had for three-plus centuries prior; after 1933, gold didn’t really either. But the same solidity and purity that defined those early coins from Bohemian mines kept the U.S. dollar afloat, even when it was cut adrift from any precious metals, as President Richard Nixon gleefully learned in 1971.

The U.S. dollar wasn’t exclusive to the United States Mint, or the Federal Reserve, or any of the places we associate with the greenback. Indeed, dollars are still made outside of empires, and Greeley shows just how banks, both in the United States and overseas, create dollars from thin air. For instance, U.S. bankers and policymakers discovered in the late 1950s that Europeans were making their own copies of the thaler in the form of eurodollars. That is to say: European banks were minting dollars outside of and beyond the purview of the U.S. monetary system. Not as counterfeiters, but as clever bankers.

There were lots of technical reasons the eurodollar market boomed that have to do with relative interest rates, but to steal a line from Greeley himself, “You don’t have the time, and I don’t have the sanity to explain.” However, that market underscored a fundamental fact: The dollar, in whichever guise it wore, was never a sovereign creation.

“Money is still today a frantic, unending, global competition, with different assets wandering across borders to serve as money without any regard to sovereignty at all,” Greeley writes. That was as true for Holy Roman Emperors as it was for Spanish merchants or U.S. cotton dealers 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. Plenty of times, especially under the gold standard, but even later, the U.S. dollar has not served regular Americans as well as it has international commerce. The debate over the bailouts for Wall Street versus Main Street during the 2008 financial crisis was just the latest manifestation of a centuries-old pattern.

Greeley never gets into the future of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and he barely mentions cryptocurrency, except to note that it shares a lot of characteristics with past ad-hoc money formulations that served a purpose for a time, until they didn’t.

That’s not a demerit. The number of words written about the supposedly doomed fate of the U.S. dollar surely outweighs the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, and yet those dollars still circulate, often even legally. The less said about crypto, the better.

What is great about this book, beyond Greeley’s unquenchable joy at toying with heavy silver coins on tabletops, is learning exactly how the thing that makes the world go around got made, and gets made, and gets around.

I’ll probably read it a third time.