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In a way, the US dollar is a Spanish invention.

The peso was the basic unit of currency in colonial America and was often abbreviated to P-S.

The story goes that over time the two letters were written over each other and then the bowl of the P was lost,

to leave an S with a vertical line through the center, a symbol now universally recognized as the dollar sign.

Despite the challenge of China and the strains of the industrialization, that dollar sign still represents the largest economy in the world.

Compared with the rest of the rich world, America's economy looks really strong right now.

But that's not the way many Americans feel about it and there are a few more powerful forces in politics than economic sentiment.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, I'm John Prado and this is Chex and Balance from the Economist.

Each week we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth.

Today, how does politics shape how Americans view the economy?

The economy is the most important issue for Americans, according to a poll conducted by you-gov for the Economist.

When asked to pick from a list of a dozen or more problems facing the nation, over a third of people say that the state of the economy or inflation is their top concern.

Most of this group plan to vote for Republicans at the midterm elections in November.

Is there a gap between how the economy is actually doing and people's perceptions?

And how much does political tribalism shape which party voters trust to manage the public purse?

With me to make sense of what's going on in America's economy at the moment and to think about how that might affect the midterms are Charlotte Howard and Idris Calune.

Charlotte, you're sitting opposite me. We're in London together. How are you finding the sweet smelling sidewalks of our capital city?

It's great to be in London though. I do miss Idris. Last week, as we all know, Idris is a serious and intelligent man who does serious and intelligent things.

So naturally, we took him to a sing-along piano bar and never has my own joy been so perfectly correlated with someone else's misery.

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