The Dollar’s Real History Begins Outside the US

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Our currency is called the dollar. That is a name that's derived from the German [language], and it referred to a Spanish coin that came from Bolivian silver or Mexican silver. I didn't know this.

[00:00:11]So this is complicated, right? We did not have this moment of sovereignty. We did not have a new country.

[00:00:17]We did not call our currency the Washington.

[00:00:19]We called it the dollar, which means we're borrowing something else.

[00:00:22]We are pegging our currency as Americans at the origin of the country to an existing currency. Um, you know, it's hard for Americans to sort of conceive of how insignificant the colonies were at the founding.

[00:00:33]And so we didn't have any domestic source of gold.

[00:00:35]We didn't have a domestic source of silver.

[00:00:37]We're taking a global currency that's circulating between the Andes and China and through Europe, and sometimes it washes up on the shores of the colonies.

[00:00:46]We're so desperate to get it that we then peg our currency to this silver coin with a German name that comes from Spain's empire.

[00:00:54]That's really problematic if you believe in monetary sovereignty, and if you believe that the country creates the denominator.

[00:01:01]The way economists talk about money, there's this break between metal and paper. And so it's very difficult to talk about this metal coin when we live in a paper and digital money world.

[00:01:12]Now I think there's a connection. And I think the moment of transition between that coin and American bank money is really important.

[00:01:18]The details matter. Um, the coins circulated in America as currency until the 1850s. The silver coin from the Spanish Empire.

[00:01:26]Uh, and so to tell the story of the dollar, what I realized is you cannot tell the story of the country. This is not the story of the Treasury Department or the fed, or of Alexander Hamilton or of America.

[00:01:36]This is the story of the currency, which is only sometimes a part of America.