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.

“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 Have-Yachts

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.

“A lucid work of economic history.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The history of the dollar is longer and more interesting than people realize. Brendan Greeley, in his The Almighty Dollar, provides the ideal guide to understanding the world's most important currency.”—Tyler Cowen, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Stagnation and Average Is Over

“Greeley has done us all a service with this terrific, erudite, breathtaking story of the Almighty U.S. Dollar, which, I now know thanks to his scholarship, came well before the United States itself! Whizzing from Bohemia of the Middle Ages right up to today’s multitrillion-dollar eurodollar market, Greeley weaves a fascinating narrative, populated by extraordinary innovators, leading us to a revolutionary conclusion that challenges many of the assumptions monetary economists make about how the modern monetary economy actually works. The Almighty Dollar is a must for anyone who wants to understand the dollar in today’s world.”—David McWilliams, #1 international bestselling author of The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Despite being a brilliant and surprisingly fun read, in writing a history of the dollar Greeley inadvertently gives us a new history of money. His key insight is that money is not some kind of magical barter-replacement device or a ring of confidence. Rather, it’s a product. Seen this way the history and the future of the dollar stand far less assured than many assume.”—Mark Blyth, author of Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers

“Greeley’s splendid quest, from Saxon mines to stable coins, makes an epic story vividly accessible. 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, New York Times bestselling author of The Haves and Have-Yachts

“Come for the sweeping—and accessible—history of the dollar and the faith people have put in it. Stay for the delightful cameos about the Saxon miners searching for Joachimsthaler, Maryland bills of credit, Hawarden, Iowa scrip, and Andrew Brimmer’s quest to get the Federal Reserve to allocate credit.”—William D. Cohan, New York Times bestselling author of Power Failure and The Last Tycoons

“This is a reporter’s book of detailed, engaging stories and a historian’s book—telling a tale that is stranger, longer, and more rich with significance than any economist’s fable.”—Rebecca Spang, author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

“This is a mesmerizing and fascinating book, breathtakingly researched and spectacularly written, that connects the big story of the dollar—and indeed of other currencies—to the actual experiences of very ordinary people whose lives are transformed, and often wrecked, by money.”—Harold James, author of Seven Crashes and The End of Globalization

“With curiosity, good humor, and a keen eye for human stories, Greeley guides us from centuries-old silver mines to the ongoing machinations of the Federal Reserve Board. Myths about economic sovereignty and objective monetary policy give way to a clear-eyed understanding of a global dollar that has always benefited some at the expense of others.”—Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

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. View titles by Brendan Greeley

The Almighty Dollar

500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money

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