What is a dollar? What even is money? These are not questions I thought I would find myself grappling with after half a century of spending with reckless abandon. (Also, I am told that I cover economics.) I thought I knew what a dollar was, and boy was I wrong.

The story of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money, by historian and journalist Brendan Greeley, is eye-opening, educational, exhaustively reported, and very fun to read. And I know that because I read it twice, after I misplaced my notes from the first reading, as often happens.

What is a dollar? What even is money? These are not questions I thought I would find myself grappling with after half a century of spending with reckless abandon. (Also, I am told that I cover economics.) I thought I knew what a dollar was, and boy was I wrong.

The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money, Brendan Greeley, Crown Currency, 432 pp., $32, May 2026

The story of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money, by historian and journalist Brendan Greeley, is eye-opening, educational, exhaustively reported, and very fun to read. And I know that because I read it twice, after I misplaced my notes from the first reading, as often happens.

Here’s the first thing to know: The United States did not invent the dollar, as the “500 years” in the subtitle may have given away. The second thing is that, even today, the United States does not really control the dollar, whatever that is, was, or will be. Like the heavy silver coins that came before it, and lent the currency its name, “[t]he dollar was an accident,” Greeley writes.

Greeley spent years at the Financial Times covering the U.S. Federal Reserve and writing about monetary policy, like a normal person, until he was seized with the idea of tracking down the origins of the dollar. In a sign that even Greeley secretly hates dollars, he is now a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton. 

Everybody knows just what a dollar........

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