The Almighty Dollar

500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money

This Princeton Event is supported by the Harvard Club of Princeton's "Harvard at Princeton" Program

Date:               September 9, 2026

Time:              4:30 to 5:45pm
Place:              Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building, Room 399

Speaker:         Brendan Greeley, Princeton University

In this ambitious and groundbreaking history of the dollar, financial journalist and economic scholar Brendan Greeley makes a new argument about the origins of our money, and the people and nations who have surrendered to it. Singular in its breadth, The Almighty Dollar dismantles the myth that America created or has ever truly controlled the dollar. Through meticulous research and vividly rendered stories of merchants, monarchs, and everyday people both past and present, Greeley shows how the dollar became America’s greatest export, spawning a vast financial industry that enriches the wealthy, even as the rest of the country’s industries suffer.

Brendan Greeley is a PhD student in the Department of History specializing in the history of money and finance, particularly in the early-modern Atlantic world. His research focuses on how different kinds of high-powered and petty money circulated in the same markets, how the production and regulation of money affected economic inequality, and how early-modern flows of African, Brazilian, and Andean gold and silver changed economic thought. He is writing a history of the dollar for Penguin Random House. Brendan comes to Princeton after 20 years as a journalist, covering economic and monetary policy. He was the US economics editor at the Financial Times, and continues to write a regular column there. Before that, he was a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist, as well as an anchor and correspondent for Bloomberg TV. He has also written for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal Europe, and received a New York Press Club Award for special event reporting in 2012. Brendan graduated from Tulane University with honors in German in 1997. 

Please join Victor Lee - he'll be wearing crimson.  Wear something crimson/burgundy!

Organizer:       Victor Lee

Cost:                   There is no charge for this event.  

Registration:      Register above and please email Victor (victorlee@stonehorseenterprises.com) if you plan to attend