00:00Our currency is called the dollar. That is a name that's derived from the German and it referred to
00:06a Spanish coin that came from Bolivian silver or Mexican silver. I didn't know this.
00:11So this is complicated, right? We did not have this moment of sovereignty. We did not have a
00:16new country. We did not call our currency the Washington. We called it the dollar,
00:20which means we're borrowing something else. We are pegging our currency as Americans at
00:24the origin of the country to an existing currency. You know, it's hard for Americans to sort of
00:29conceive of how insignificant the colonies were at the founding. And so we didn't have
00:34any domestic source of gold. We didn't have any domestic source of silver. We're taking
00:37a global currency that's circulating between the Andes and China and through Europe. And sometimes
00:44it washes up on the shores of the colonies. We're so desperate to get it that we then peg our
00:49currency
00:50to this silver coin with a German name that comes from Spain's empire. That's really problematic
00:55if you believe in monetary sovereignty and if you believe that the country creates the denominator.
01:01The way economists talk about money, there's this break between metal and paper. And so it's very
01:07difficult to talk about this metal coin when we live in a paper and digital money world now. I think
01:13there's a connection. And I think the moment of transition between that coin and American bank
01:17money is really important. The details matter. The coin circulated in America as currency until the 1850s,
01:23the silver coin from the Spanish empire. And so to tell the story of the dollar,
01:29what I realized is you cannot tell the story of the country. This is not the story of the Treasury
01:33Department or the Fed or of Alexander Hamilton or of America. This is the story of the currency,
01:38which is only sometimes a part of America.
01:41ALEX SMARA
01:41.
01:41.
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