Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires. I'm the co-host of Slate Money and a contributing writer to the New York Times. And today I'm joined by Matt Sikirke and Steve Hanke, the authors of Making Money Work, How to

Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System. So guys, introduce yourself. Matt, you first. Thanks.

I'm a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, where Professor Hankey is the

co-director and founder. And I'm a visiting fellow at Durham University Business School in the

United Kingdom. And Steve? I'm a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in

Baltimore and a variety of other odds and ends. I'm actually in my 56th year at Johns Hopkins.

Oh, congratulations. I'm the senior man around.

So you two have written a provocative book about the global monetary system and how it could be

reformed. And we're going to be talking about all of that coming up on money talks.

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So Steve and Matt, we are taping this in the middle of a broad tariff war

and an environment where the dollar is being weakened by the current administration's policies.

And you have just written a book about reforming monetary policy in the U.S.

And really rethinking the way that we think about money and in particular the quantity

of money. What do you mean by that? The first thing is most people don't realize that commercial

banks produce most of the money in the economy. Roughly around 80% of the money supply is actually

...