On what would you spend your last dollar?
That may be a trick question; you can’t get much with a dollar anymore. Half a candy bar? A sniff of gasoline? Even a box of tenpenny nails will set you back more than ten pennies. So what will you do with your last dollar? Because, as you’ll see in “The Almighty Dollar” by Brendan Greeley, there’s more where that single buck came from.
In the mid-winter of 1518, silver miners in the mountains of northern Bohemia had themselves a big party, and things got kinda wild. Miners got drunk and ran through the streets like banshees, partly because they’d demanded higher wages for work, and succeeded.
The better-quality silver coins they’d get came from a city named St. Joachimsthal, and were called joachimsthalers, then just “thalers.” Under a number of localized names, the thaler eventually became the currency of many European countries.
Historians believe that the dollar came to America in the colonial era, by necessity.
Today, says Greeley, we generally underestimate the lackadaisical attitude toward America that Europe had then; there was no real impetus to make coins in America, so no one bothered.
In 1764, the then-governor of Maryland made a move to change that. He sent two letters to England that launched an eventual process for making “printed slips of paper that replicated the value of” the currency that the rest of the world had mostly been using for centuries. Maryland, in other words, was tired of financial mishmash, and wanted hard cash.
And yet, despite the necessary presence of a North American-centric form of currency, early Americans still crafted various ways to buy and sell goods through a mixture of foreign money, scrip, and promissory notes that could get confusing. Merchants extended credit or made loans, while American tradesmen enjoyed an exchange rate with England that benefited both.
Further change was not swift, Greeley says, until a few years after the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s; our federal government still recognized overseas silver dollars as legal tender.
While this, the first historical part of “The Almighty Dollar,” starts out somewhat dry, the real reason you want this book is in its second half. If, in fact, you do nothing with this book but read from page 153 onward, then it’s worth 32 pieces of its subject matter.
That’s because author Brendan Greeley explains in his second part how banking works, in easy-to-grasp wording, and he makes it relevant to today’s financial world. You’ll learn many painful, blunt truths about your money – you’ve been warned! – and you’ll see why paying attention to current events is essential to your wallet. This doesn’t make the first half unworthy of your time; it is an interesting history, but most readers concerned about their dollars will find Part II to be the better read.
So drag a few Washingtons out of your billfold. Chuck some bucks on the counter when you find “The Almighty Dollar.” Start it, stick with it, and you’ll see that it’s worth spending time.
Terri Schlichenmeyer’s reviews of business books are read in more than 260 publications in the U.S. and Canada.