Brendan Greeley

Promise?

This is comforting, thank you. I started the PhD in the middle of writing the book because I had reached a point sitting alone in a room where I thought either a) these are good and new ideas, no one's ever done this before or b) no one's ever done this before because the ideas are insanely stupid.

Did everyone else go through a moment in their dissertation sitting in the archives looking at a cart of documents, when the full astringent shock of how little you know hits you, followed by the faint bitter aftertaste of how implausible your idea is?

There's a brief section in my dollar book where I try to explain bank money creation because you can't understand dollar notes and deposit dollars with a loanable funds model in your head.

Please do this. Writing financial history I have this regular challenge where I have to first remind people what they were taught in college about money and banking, then I have to tell them it was wrong.

I regularly have to explain to students in their third or fourth year of an undergrad economics degree that commercial banks create most of our money when they make loans.

Chart of the day - from a column by @katie0martin.ft.com on the death of the Trump trade. Chart by @raydouglas.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/cfdc...

My only issue with London is that I can’t stop singing “Walthamstow” to the tune of “Gangnam Style.”

If the President of the United States has free rein to address fundamental international payments problems then I would like to announce my candidacy

Boss: Oh never mind
Clerk to other clerk afterwards: I can't believe he just made me waste an entire page

A handwritten page in an old ledger that begins “to all whom” and then abruptly ends

I mean, starting a proclamation for the Royal Mint and then forgetting what the hell you were going to proclaim, who hasn’t been there before

A clerk in 1693 or so doodled the word “elephant” on his ledger for no clear reason. Office work has always been boring.

Regulatory clarity: I clearly don’t wish to be regulated

WH tells NY Fed it is subject to The Mandate Of Kevin.

There is nothing in finance that can’t be done more profitably with less oversight

This open contempt makes me worried about what's going to happen to the research staff at the Fed's Board of Governors under the other Kevin.

This answer - from one of the president’s key economic advisors - is disgraceful.

And, fwiw, the number for tariff pass through is closer to 94-96 percent

Welcome! I follow mostly academics, where the loathing for “the media” is high. Sometimes I try to remind them that’s me and everyone else I ever worked with, mostly I just block the worst of it.

"Not sustainable in any way."

While President Trump declares victory on affordability, companies are preparing to raise their prices to offset his tariffs. @bhgreeley.bsky.social and Natasha Sarin discuss on the #11thHour.

The Almighty Dollar by Brendan Greeley: 9780593138885 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books 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...

Our first session in the Year of the Fire Horse will be with @bhgreeley.bsky.social on Friday, March 27, at 12 PM Eastern/9 AM Pacific. The topic: his forthcoming _The Almighty Dollar_. As ever, contact joseph.tinguely//AT//usd.edu for the Zoom link

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634502...

Have we hit peak dollar bearishness? No respect for the greenback

Couldn't agree more with the conclusions @robinwigglesworth.ft.com draws here. The dollar's decline looks overdone against the fundamentals, flows into US markets remain robust, and positioning looks crowded.

FT Alphaville: Have we hit peak dollar bearishness?
www.ft.com/content/89b9...

This shut down my brain. I keep trying to respond but it’s robbed me of the ability to think

I cut 15,000 words from the second draft and my wife now pronounces the galley “totally readable.”

Those words you cut are not the good words, they’re the bad ones. They’re the eggs a cuckoo left for you to raise. They were a burden.

Reading American history will break your heart a thousand times but it will also fill you with such admiration and awe for all the people who were excluded from the protection of America’s founding principles and fought to promote, protect and expand them anyways

How are you getting AI to pull together reading lists? Which tools are you using? I believe you when you say it’s useful, but when I tried I found the results were all hallucinated.

Her brother is in town and I am making pizza for her whole family but IT'S NOT A VALENTINE'S DAY THING

Every year the people in my life ask what I'm doing for Valentine's Day and I say "My wife believes Valentine's Day is a scam and has instructed me to do nothing" and the people in my life say "She's testing you, you have to do something" and I say "The test is whether I follow her instructions."