More Than America’s Money

Source details

Publication: F&D Magazine; James Boughton; September 2026.
Reviewed title: The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money — Brendan Greeley; Penguin Random House; New York, NY, 2026, 432 pp., $32.
Reviewer credentials: JAMES BOUGHTON is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a former IMF historian.
Key framing: Greeley argues the dollar’s enduring appeal “may owe less to Washington than to decades of worldwide use,” and that “The dollar is not America’s currency” but “works for the world—for now.”

Greeley traces a timeline that starts in 1518, when a silver mine in Bohemia began minting silver coins called thalers.
The thaler spread among traders as a mechanism to overcome multiple and unstable currencies; in Spain the thaler became the dólar.
The review notes the dollar became the official currency of the United States through an act of the Continental Congress in July 1785, which makes the age of the “almighty” dollar just 241 years.
Greeley’s broader subtitle and framing treat the dollar as having a 500-year lineage through its origins in the thaler.

Central mechanism highlighted: contracts denominated in dollars (historically called “Eurodollars”) underpin the bulk of international trade and finance.
Key point: Anyone in the world can create US dollars by entering a contract with payment committed in this currency.
Empirical claim preserved exactly: Eurodollars “far exceed the domestic US money stock,” and they are “beyond the control of the US government and the Federal Reserve.”

Conventional view summarized: Continued global dollar dominance depends on the US keeping its financial house in order; persistent large federal budget deficits and doubts about US financial soundness threaten dollar dominance.
Alternative perspective (Greeley): The dollar’s role stems from “a series of habits built up over the past fifty years,” implying its continuation may be driven by entrenched practices rather than US policy alone.
Question posed: Will the US dollar continue to be the world’s dominant currency, or be unseated by the euro, the renminbi, the SDR, crypto, or another currency? The review concludes: “No one knows whether it will happen,” and notes that “no currency has such worldwide acceptance as to credibly challenge the widespread demand for the dollar” so far.
Comparative literature: Other recent histories (Paul Blustein’s King Dollar and Barry Eichengreen’s Money Beyond Borders) base projections on the strength of US economic policies; Greeley emphasizes persistence of habits.

Boughton’s assessment: Greeley presents an engaging history and a provocative thesis that complements but does not fully overturn conventional views; “Perhaps the best lesson to take from this story is not that the conventional view is wrong but that it is not quite complete.”
Analytical implication: Dollar dominance reflects both institutional and contractual forces (policy and habits/practices), and policymaking assessments should account for the decentralized creation of dollar-denominated assets and longstanding international habits.

Source: IMF F&D Magazine book review by James Boughton, September 2026.

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