Author: Farley Grubb

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-07-06

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0226826031

"An essential new history of America's monetary origins. The Second Continental Congress faced multiple daunting challenges when it was convened in summer 1775. First the assembly had to create a de facto government for the loosely joined colonies that would become the United States. It then had to strategize a war effort for what would become the American Revolution. And it also had to figure out how to pay for all of it-without the benefit of any real legal authority to do so. The Continental Dollar is a sweeping, revelatory new history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Economist Farley Grubb upends the folk telling of this story, in which the US printed cross-colony money, called Continentals, to serve as an early fiat currency-a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold, but rather to the viability and legal authority of the issuer. As Grubb outlines in rigorous terms, the Continental was not a fiat currency, but a "zero-coupon bond"-a wholly different species of currency that is both value-anchored (one Continental was a promise to pay the holder one milled Spanish silver dollar after a defined future time) and subject to discounting by the issuer if that issuer needs fast capital. Through this lens, and as confirmed by Grubb's exhaustive mining of 18th-century colonial monetary records, the appearance of Continental-dollar depreciation was, in fact, capricious discounting: the US was playing easy money in the face of an expensive war. Drawing on decades of research and careful mining of historical evidence, The Continental Dollar is an essential and authoritative origin story of the early American monetary system. It is certain to serve as the benchmark for critical work in this space for decades to come"--