Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We love talking about money. And of course, we love talking about the dollar, in all its varieties — from bank deposits to eurodollars to stablecoins. But what fundamentally is a dollar and who actually controls it? To understand these questions, you need to understand how the dollar was born. Journalist (and current Ph.D. candidate in financial history) Brendan Greeley argues not only that the dollar is older than you might suspect, but that the dollar long precedes the United States itself. In fact, the word is derived from German, referring to a Spanish currency made from silver found in Mexico. In this episode, we discuss Brendan's new book, The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money. He explains not only the dollar's surprising history, but also what actually backs the US dollar and gives it purchasing power.
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Transcript
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| 1:05.4 | Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. |
| 1:21.0 | Thank you. Radio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. |
| 1:24.2 | I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 1:25.3 | And I'm Joe Wisenthal. |
| 1:26.8 | Joe, we enjoy talking about money. Yeah. In all its flavors. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, we enjoy talking about money. |
| 1:28.9 | Yeah. In all its flavors. I love money. |
| 1:31.9 | We all love money. Someone's going to clip that. That's it. That's the podcast. |
| 1:35.1 | Someone's going to clip that out, Joe, saying, I love money. You know, I love money. |
| 1:40.3 | Talking about it in particular, having it's good too. Talking about it's nice. |
| 1:45.4 | Finding it is even better. |
| 1:47.1 | What you can do with it, where you can allocate it to all very interesting questions. |
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