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On his first weekend as the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed came out swinging. In contrast, the Republican senator who made Todd Blanche attorney general had everybody cringing.

The Democratic Alliance party promised to end political patronage as it targets Johannesburg voters ahead of November’s local government polls.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.In a new interview, Donald Trump lavished extensive praise on himself as always, but in the process, he made a surprising admission. He said straight out that his voters might not turn out for Republican candidates in the midterms. Then he said that voters are not angry at him, they’re angry at Republicans.For a lot of reasons, that’s really not what Republican candidates want to hear right now. It also comes amid many new signs that Trump and MAGA voters really might not turn out. Yet it comes as well as polls show the Democratic lead in the House ballot matchup isn’t quite as high as it needs to be. To dig through how all this is really playing on the ground, we’re talking to Shripal Shah, who oversees ad expenditures at the Dem-aligned House Majority PAC. Shripal, thanks for coming on.Shripal Shah: Appreciate you having me. Good to see you.Sargent: You too, man. Let’s start with the striking Trump quote. Speaking to Punchbowl News, Trump is talking here about his voters and asks if they’ll turn out in the midterms with him not on the ballot. Listen.Donald Trump (voiceover): If I don’t run, will those people go out and vote? And that’s the one thing I can’t te—I’m going to ask them to. The question is, will they vote? ‘Cause a lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you.Reporter (voiceover): Why is that?Trump (voiceover): They’re angry at Repu—I don’t know. They’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me. That’s an interesting thing.Reporter (voiceover): Why, though?Trump (voiceover): They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.Sargent: Shripal, not only does he admit here that GOP voters might not turn out, he also says that voters are angry at Republicans and not angry at him, which I think a lot of his voters will hear as discouraging them from voting in the midterms. What do you make of all that?Shah: I think for the first time in what seems like a long time, he’s actually spot on as far as his voters not showing up in a midterm. And that’s not spin coming from a Democratic operative or anything like that. We have evidence, right? Based on history, you can likely bank on that. And I think that one underscores a lot of the challenges that Republicans saw across the board in 2022. And I would not be surprised to see this cycle continue on that trajectory for 2026.The interesting thing that we’re seeing in a lot of polling that we’re doing right now across the battleground, in specific districts—including districts outside of those tier-one coin-flip districts that were won by a Democrat or a Republican by a few thousand votes in this direction or that one—I’m talking about districts that Trump won by double digits in certain places, some in Ohio, some in Iowa, et cetera, et cetera. It’s not just that he’s underwater. The data that we are seeing suggests that the intensity behind his negative approval, or strongly disapprove or strongly unfavorable—there are places, it’s not uncommon what we’re seeing, that number north of 50, which is unprecedented.Sargent: I do agree that it’s a big and undercovered story that Trump’s strong disapproval numbers are just wildly crazy. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it, as he would say. CNN’s Harry Enten points out another good point—that nationally, House Republicans are running about nine points ahead of Trump’s approval, which is stuck at around 37 percent. Trump’s numbers are just terrible. But it’s a little unclear to me, at least now, whether Democrats are orienting their strategy around that. Very roughly speaking, do you anticipate that Trump will appear in a lot of House Majority ads this fall, or only some, or not too many?Shah: I don’t know that you will ever see a scenario where uniformly you just put Trump in every single piece of communication. And I think that’s for a few different reasons. One, Trump is already baked into the cake, right? We’re not actually offering any new information to a voter about Donald Trump’s agenda. And voters generally already believe that the House Republicans and Trump are joined at the hip, rightfully, because they are.Now, are there certain exceptions? Absolutely, there will be exceptions, particularly with certain audiences. But what we have found is that you don’t necessarily need to lead with that in a way that makes the argument incredibly over the top and in your face, because I think voters already fully understand that. I think our task is more informing people about how House Republicans have supported or amplified the consequences of the Trump agenda on the voters and on the American people, and that’s where you’ll see us focus.Sargent: Trump is so unpopular that he’s even losing parts of his base. A recent Politico poll finds only a little more than one-third of MAGA voters say the war is now worth the costs, and there’s been a sharp drop in MAGA support for the war. Now, let’s listen to this as well. It’s an interviewer talking to Trump voters. The first voice is the reporter, and then you’ll hear the Trump voters. Check this out.Reporter (voiceover): Is this how you expected the second Trump term to go?Voter (voiceover): No, not at all. I hoped it was going to be so much better.Reporter (voiceover): He also promised no new foreign wars. We’re obviously in this war in Iran, which is why we’re seeing the gas prices so high. What do you make of the president not keeping those campaign promises?Voter (voiceover): He just told us what we wanted to hear to vote him back in.Reporter (voiceover): What would your message be to him about the economy right now, about prices, about day-to-day life?Voter (voiceover): I would tell him, ‘You promised us you would lower prices, bring back what it used to be.’ Voter (voiceover): I was hoping that gas was going to go down so I could do something. You can’t do anything with gas prices. And you just can’t, you can’t afford to breathe at this point.Reporter (voiceover): Are you regretting your vote right now?Voter (voiceover): I have. The past two years, yeah, I have. I’m actually not even voting the next time.Sargent: Shripal, MAGA is plainly cracking up here. The coalition is in major fracture mode. Can you tell us what you’re seeing both in the data and on the ground on that front?Shah: Yeah, I think it’s very real, and it’s not a difficult thing to comprehend when you realize he ran on releasing the Epstein files, and then they keep voting to block ‘em. He ran on lowering costs. Costs continue to go high, and that’s driven by foreign policy, but also tariffs. Promised no more wars, and now we’re in a war that allegedly has ended 30 times over in the last six weeks and is continuing to go and go. And so you can only lie to people for so long, and so many times, before they start to turn on you, and you’re seeing that.I think people are no longer willing to just turn a blind eye to what is in front of them when it has such a deep impact on their day-to-day lives, like that woman who was talking about filling up her tank and not being able to afford to breathe. You can’t continue to try and pull one over on people when their reality is directly at odds with what you’re trying to sell them.We saw this in 2009 and ‘10 as well, but it was very similar. People, with each passing week and month—Obama owned the economy more and more, even though people believed that George Bush was responsible for the underlying challenges. He’s in charge now. You can’t continue to look backwards and expect people to give you a pass, and that’s where I think the reckoning is going to be really rooted in.Sargent: OK, so there are around 58 GOP-held districts that are really in play right now. Can I ask, this fall, as we really approach the election, how many of those districts do you think House Majority PAC will really fully play in? Like, real investments and real money. I know you can’t give me an exact number, not asking for that. Roughly, like a big chunk of those districts, or half, or less than half? What?Shah: I think that what you’re going to see—in the same way that you saw in 2006, 2008, 2018, et cetera—is that it’s not necessarily playing in every single place, but the battlefield is going to move pretty dramatically from early September to mid-October, in that we could hypothetically, if things continue on a good trajectory, not necessarily have to expend a lot of resources in tier-one places that six months ago I would’ve told you, like, We are going to be there till the end, because the environment is shifting in such a rapid way, where Republicans are cutting and running from certain districts that just don’t have paths to them that they thought maybe they were going to, and the terrain just shifts.So we could be potentially moving away from places from an offensive posture—this district doesn’t need these resources anymore because the Republican doesn’t have a path to victory. That’s what’s happened in a lot of positive election cycles dating back to 2018, 2006, et cetera, et cetera. I would not be surprised if that’s what happens this time around. But we are competing with MAGA Inc., that has close to a trillion dollars to spend, and that is one of the dynamics that could make it more consistent, where you’re just in a lot of places, as opposed to things shifting from one to another. A lot of it depends on how September plays out.Sargent: OK. So to ask it a little differently, of the 58 districts that are in play right now, how many do you expect will really genuinely be in play, to the point where you’re really putting money into them? I understand that there’s going to be a core of races in the middle, the most competitive races, where you may just actually pull resources out ‘cause they’re pretty much squared away. What’s the size of the battlefield at the end of this, do you think?Shah: That, you’ve got to come back to me in about a month, because it could be as low as 30 to 40, or it could be as high as 50. It’s really hard to say right now. We’re still looking at every district very closely. We’re still doing a lot of polling. We’re still figuring out where we have identified opportunities for offense and to pick up a seat. Look at the—the map is dynamic because of their activities as well, right? Chuck Edwards sits in North Carolina, his 11th District, which is a district that I believe Trump won by close to double digits last time around. Couple days ago he announced he’s not running anymore, right? And so they’ve got to find a new candidate. We don’t know what that does to that race. I would be willing to bet that there’s still opportunity for us over there. But until we know who we’re running against, it’s hard to handicap that race until we have the opportunity to do the things that we need to do.There’s districts like Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, where a guy who dropped out on the Republican side about a month ago won the primary over a Trump-endorsed nominee who had run a real campaign, because MAGA voters weren’t going to vote for that guy—for whatever reason they decided not to vote for him, and I think we could probably guess why. And the map is continuing to shift pretty rapidly due to external events. So it’s just hard to say, the first week of August, where we think September’s going to look like and what do we think October’s going to look like.Sargent: So right now Dems lead in the House generic ballot matchup by around six or seven points, depending on which set of averages you use. That strikes me as not big enough. It would be big enough to win the House, but not by what I think we’d like to see, not by the big margins we’d like to see, and it certainly wouldn’t be enough to get you the Senate. Do you guys regard six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup as big enough? And where do you expect it to be after September and October and early November?Shah: I think it is big enough, because it represents a roughly eight- to nine-point shift from 2024, right? We lost the House in 2024 by what, 6,000 votes spread out across a handful of districts. An eight-point shift not only sweeps us to victory in a lot of those coin-flip places, but it puts all these second-tier places in play too.It’s also—despite the fact that we’re only 90 days out from election day, we’re still early. A lot of these campaigns have not really begun in earnest, particularly in the House, where the races are a lot smaller than these Senate races, and you don’t start communicating until September and litigating your case against the Republican incumbent or the Republican challenger in earnest until September.I do think you will see a pretty dramatic shift come mid- to late September in the generic ballot. If you do not, that doesn’t worry me, because the generic ballot in a lot of these polls—I do think that people are still, by design or not, potentially building out samples that are still a little conservative. And I think that pollsters don’t want to be wrong in the wrong direction, right? So they’re making their data potentially a little more conservative than it ought to be, because they don’t want to bet on being too aggressive and too optimistic for the Democrats and be wrong. It’s easier to say, “Oh, we actually won by a lot, not just by a little,” and I think you will start to see those models and those screens start to shift a little bit as we get into September as well.But I think we are where we want to be. The trajectory that we’re on is the most important thing, and that feels good. And I think that once these races really start to get litigated in September, particularly in these tier-two, tier-three races that haven’t seen robust campaigns in recent years at the House level, that’s when you’ll start to have a better understanding of the trajectory and the environment in which we’re operating in 2026.Sargent: You guys are polling a lot. House Majority PAC has released a lot of its internal polls, so I’m going to ask you a question about the polling. Right now, in HMP polling, are Dem candidates leading in enough districts—in a number of districts that’s sizably larger than the handful of seats that Dems need to flip to win the House? In other words, are Dems up in a big enough bloc of districts in your polling that you have a real cushion over what you need to get?Shah: As of now, we are.Sargent: OK. How many?Shah: Oh, God, I don’t have all our polls memorized. But if the election were today, we would take back the House, yes.Sargent: All right. So it sounds like you guys think you’re on this trajectory to win the House. You said that if it’s a national advantage of six or seven points in the generic ballot matchup, you guys would win the House. Like, how big a margin would six or seven points get you, though? As far as I can tell, a lot of the analysis shows that because of the redistricting successes, the gerrymandering successes that Republicans had, Dems need to win the House national ballot by three points just to take the House to begin with. If you get to six points or seven points, which is where it is now, roughly how many seats are we talking about flipping here?Shah: You need to also remember, though, that the way that this gerrymander has taken place in places, particularly in Texas—they were relying on Trump 2024 numbers to draw those maps. That might be where you find that Republicans made the biggest strategic error, because I think that they believed that they had a lock on the Latino vote in South Texas particularly, when in reality, the Latino vote, dating back to 2016 if not before, is the most swingy of swingy electoral blocs there is, right? By definition, the Latino vote goes back and forth, and you have to fight for that vote. And so I don’t think that you can just take that calculus that you just described, where you’ve got to win by this number to do this, and this—it doesn’t account for those swings, I don’t believe.And so I think that is where some folks are making a little bit of a miscalculation on where there is opportunity for us. You’ve seen us put out a poll last week in Texas 15 that says Pulido is winning over Congresswoman De La Cruz, and I think that is a real opportunity for us. That is a district that Trump won by double digits last time around, right? And so I just want to be clear on that. I think it’s hard to give a number at the moment because I don’t have a comprehensive view of the battlefield just yet. I’m still polling in a lot of places. But I do feel like, if election day were today, you would see a margin for the House Democrats that’s north of 10 seats probably.Sargent: Shripal, can you explain the strategy behind putting data centers in so many ads? It seems like Dems are looking for a villain who isn’t Trump. Am I right in saying that, and what’s the theory of the case here?Shah: I don’t think it’s necessarily looking for a villain. I think it’s tapping into something that people are already mad about, which is their high electricity bills. You understand why people would be pissed off about that, because it plays into this larger argument about government corruption and people being on the take for their donors and stuff like that. And it taps into the sentiment that Washington’s not looking out for these people, and they only care about their donors while I’m getting screwed. That’s the cost of the Republican corruption. And all of that together is a pretty solid argument to make, and you will see us do more and more on that over the next 90 days.Sargent: All right, Shripal, just to circle back to where we started. Donald Trump is extremely unpopular. His base is falling apart. He’s losing MAGA voters on a number of different fronts. You guys are competing in a number of very Trumpy districts, in rural districts with a lot of Trump voters in them. Do you really think that you can flip some of those, or is it just going to be, at the end of the day, the low-hanging fruit? What are you seeing in the Trumpy rural districts right now? Is there a genuine opportunity to finally make inroads with some of these voters that have been so hard for Democrats to get to? And if so, how is that happening?Shah: I think there is a genuine opportunity. I think there is a genuine backlash and unhappiness at a high intensity with the way that Republicans, led by Donald Trump, have managed the country and managed to make things worse on the economy since getting into office about 18 months ago. And I think for us, it is capitalizing on that with our own vision for how we would do things differently. And you are seeing candidates do that at scale, and will see candidates do that at further scale in September and October, and I think that’s where opportunities in some of these more traditionally red-leaning districts exist for 2026.Sargent: Are you concerned about the Democratic brand? Is that holding back the ability to convert some of these voters or not?Shah: I think that voters are generally unhappy with politicians across the board, and that is not new. I think where our opportunity lies is that a lot of the terrain is offensive terrain, where an individual candidate can run and create their own brand by communicating with the voter. And they’re not running necessarily in these offensive opportunity districts on a brand that is rooted in Washington, D.C. And so that gives them opportunity to create their own brand, to communicate about their own agenda, and to articulate how they would serve and how they would do the job differently, and that’s where the opportunity comes to have the success in some of these places that you might not have otherwise.Sargent: Shripal Shah, thanks so much for coming on, man. Good to see you. Appreciate it.Shah: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Dangote’s $5B refinery IPO could anchor a flurry of listings and M&A — and test whether Africa can turn renewed dealmaking into deeper, more liquid markets.

Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is a mirage, a conjuring trick in which peace is unilaterally declared as Israel seizes more Palestinian land and brings the genocide to its grim conclusion.

The most powerful tool of the American imperium is not, as is generally supposed, its military, but rather its currency. Other nations (China, India) possess more troops, but none possesses more legal tender. There were 57,000,000,000 dollar-denominated bills in circulation last year. By comparison, euro-denominated bills—the world’s second-most-widely circulated currency, minted not by one nation but by 21—numbered 31,000,000,000. The combined monetary value of the 57 billion greenbacks was $2.4 trillion; for the 31 billion euro notes, $1.6 trillion.And that’s just paper money. How much of your net worth resides in your wallet? In our increasingly cashless society, I sometimes go months absentmindedly forgetting to pull dead-tree dollars out of my ATM. Serious money resides in banks and other financial institutions. Economists speak of “reserve currencies,” or currencies held round the world by central banks and other government institutions like our Federal Reserve. These reserves can be paper currency or paper bonds or gold bars, but mostly they’re just blips on a computer screen. Well over half of this money, or about $7 trillion, consists of U.S. dollars. Euros account for less than $3 trillion. Most international trade occurs in dollars, too, not just in the United States but throughout the world, and when foreign corporations hedge against currency fluctuations, they do so overwhelmingly with dollars. In effect, the dollar is not merely American currency; it’s a global currency, too.The dollar has ruled the world for the past 80 years, and in the past 50, it has displaced gold as the anchor of the world economy. As a consequence, Republican presidents have been able to cut taxes on the rich without reducing government spending to any meaningful degree. Economic logic dictates that, if the United States runs up irresponsibly large budget deficits—as of March 31 the deficit exceeds 100 percent of gross domestic product—the result will be cripplingly high interest rates as the bond market becomes glutted with U.S. debt in the form of Treasury bonds. But that hasn’t happened, because the global appetite for Treasurys has been limitless. Debt is America’s leading export.With countries as with people, there’s bound to be some point at which so much debt accrues that the debtor can’t repay. Over the past four decades, deficit hawks have been consistently wrong about where, for the United States, that point lies, and in the view of some modern monetary theorists, no such point exists. A more likely answer is that that point, though more distant than previously we dared believe, will one day be stumbled upon, and when it does the United States will renege on its obligations through either hyperinflation (thereby reducing its creditors’ expected return) or outright default.Foreigners who buy U.S. Treasurys aren’t stupid; they’re well aware of this danger. Yet they continue to buy Treasurys, bolstering what Valéry Giscard ­d’Estaing, when he was France’s minister of finance in the 1960s (later he was president), described resentfully as America’s privilège exorbitant. The U.S. government, Giscard complained, can manage its economy however it wishes and never diminish the dollar’s dominance. In 1971, for instance, President Richard Nixon wished unilaterally to tear up the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement by taking the United States off the gold standard. Treasury Secretary John Connally casually told emissaries from our leading trade partners: “The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” It was our trading partners’ problem because their currencies’ value was now pegged to a dollar that was losing value. But did our trade partners uncouple from the United States? They did not.At the moment, President Donald Trump is doing his inadvertent damnedest to throw America’s exorbitant privilege away. During the brief period of extreme financial turmoil that followed Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” global tariffs in April 2025 (before a market tumble persuaded Trump to delay their implementation to permit negotiations), there was no rush to buy Treasurys; instead, there was a sell-off. That prompted speculation that the dollar would never again be a safe haven. Trump also threatened not-so-obliquely to default on the nation’s debt. Overall, Trump’s presidency has driven the dollar’s value down about 10 percent. But in spite of all this, the dollar retains its dominance in global finance. It’s harder to kill than Rasputin.Why do other countries put up with our dollar? Why do foreign investors enable exorbitant privilege no matter what?The biggest reason the U.S. dollar reigns supreme is liquidity. When you have a lot of money, you’ve got to stash it someplace, and your choice of where will depend a lot on how easily you can extract it when you need to. As the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff puts it in Our Dollar, Your Problem, “U.S. Treasury debt is very easy to sell quickly and without excessive transaction costs.” It’s easy to extract because there’s so goddamned much of it. With the U.S. national debt totaling about $39 trillion, nobody who sells a lot of Treasurys in a hurry need worry that doing so will drive down the price.Why do other countries put up with our dollar? Why do foreign investors enable exorbitant privilege no matter what?Another reason foreigners put their money in Treasurys is stability. The dollar’s governing structure is more consistent than that of the multilateral euro, and the rule of law is much stronger in the United States than in, for instance, China, whose renminbi might otherwise be an excellent substitute. Granted, the rule of law is taking a heavy beating under Trump, including within the realm of finance. But the world operates under the TACO hypothesis (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) that Trump’s most erratic governing impulses will always be checked by adverse market signals.Another check on Trump has been the independence of the Federal Reserve. The primacy of the dollar makes the Fed chair a sort of central banker to the entire world. This extraordinary power has always created tension between presidents and the Fed. Trump differs in carrying it to an extreme by, for instance, attempting to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook (resisted thus far by the courts) and harassing then–Fed Chair Jerome Powell with the threat of frivolous prosecution (ended by the refusal of Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina to advance Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as Powell’s successor, until the investigation was dropped). Should Trump successfully gain control of a previously independent Fed and set interest rates irresponsibly low even as inflation rises—which is what Trump wants—then Treasurys will get harder to sell.Even if that happens, though, it remains likely that the dollar will maintain its global primacy. A notable test was the Great Inflation of the 1970s. In 1973, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, imposed an oil embargo against the United States. These countries were already angered by Nixon’s ending the gold standard two years earlier, because it reduced the value of their petrodollars. Now they pushed inflation even higher because they were furious that the United States supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria. The embargo quadrupled the price of oil, creating an enormous windfall for Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis had to figure out where to put it. You can guess the rest. In secret negotiations, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Treasury Secretary William Simon persuaded the Saudis to park it (shh!) in Treasurys sold on uniquely favorable terms—never mind that this benefited the same United States that the Saudis were trying to punish. International skirmishes come and go, but the dollar is forever.The paradoxes multiply. Foreign nations nearly always buy Treasurys in times of international turmoil … even when that turmoil originates in the United States! Remember the 2008 global financial crisis? “The bulk of the misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance,” the former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Blustein explains in King Dollar, “stemmed from problems in the United States,” mainly through reckless securitizing of mortgages on houses that buyers couldn’t afford. “Yet money rushed into the dollar.” Heads we win, tails you lose.For the United States, the dollar isn’t only a tool for borrowing on the cheap; more ominously, it’s what Rogoff calls “a de facto branch of the U.S. armed services.” In recent decades, presidents and the Treasury have gotten bolder about weaponizing the dollar against enemies through the imposition of economic sanctions. If we’ve been slow to notice this, that’s probably because the only high-profile target we’ve seen surrender unequivocally to sanctions is South Africa’s apartheid regime. Cuba, the Soviet Union, Iraq, Russia, and Iran all found ways to defy American sanctions.But shift your eyes from our enemies to our friends, and you’ll see how powerful sanctions can be. The United States uses the threat of secondary sanctions against U.S. allies to compel them to participate in our embargoes. Under Trump, such bullying of America’s friends has been routine. Thus when Trump in 2018 declared, largely out of petty personal animus toward President Barack Obama, that we would withdraw from the multilateral agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear program and reimpose sanctions, the European Union declined to reimpose sanctions alongside us. But because Trump’s secondary sanctions barred U.S. banks from engaging in any transactions with foreign companies that did business with Iran—effectively exiling those companies not only from the United States but also from other countries with which they bought and sold in dollars—foreign firms were forced to comply with the sanctions.In King Dollar, Blustein argues persuasively that the dollar will remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future. In Our Dollar, Your Problem, Rogoff is less confident about that. “It would be folly,” Rogoff writes, “to ignore the many ‘this time is different’ Pax Dollar assumptions built into today’s markets that may well be upended over the next decade, if not much sooner.” In his preface to the paperback edition of King Dollar, Blustein in effect says he hopes Rogoff is right and that he is wrong, because after observing the first year of Trump’s second presidency, he’s concluded that the dollar is too dangerous a weapon for Trump to possess. “Trump has been using economic coercion for purposes that I consider boneheaded and shameful,” Blustein writes, citing, among other actions, his threats to annex Canada. “With the dollar,” Blu­stein continues, “Trump can wield an even more fearsome bludgeon than the tariffs he has imposed. I wish Trump didn’t have that kind of power, but no good will come of pretending that it isn’t so.”Brendan Greeley, after 20 years at the FT, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Economist, chucked full-time journalism to pursue a doctorate in economic history at Princeton and write a passion-project narrative history of the dollar. Deeply researched and almost giddily contrarian, The Almighty Dollar treats the dollar not as an instrument of imperial might but rather as an itinerant hunk of metal, piece of paper, or blip on a screen with something resembling free will. In Greeley’s conception, the Fed chair and the president don’t control the dollar; the dollar controls them. His book transports the reader out of the distressing present into distant times and places that echo loudly into the present.“The biography of the dollar,” Greeley explains, “is not the biography of America.” The dollar was born 506 years ago in what today is the Czech Republic; it was raised to maturity in what today is Spain; then washed ashore in the American colonies. No nation invented it. It was extracted initially from the Ore Mountains dividing Bohemia and Saxony—two kingdoms within the Holy Roman Empire—by a minor Bohemian nobleman named Stephan Schlick. Schlick was, Greeley writes, “an ambitious huckster.” He had no clear claim to the land and lacked permission from the Bohemian crown to mine it. But there was a lot of silver there, so he took it.Schlick’s purpose was not to create currency. The Holy Roman Empire already had a currency, the silver groschen coin and the gold Rhine florin. Rather, Schlick extracted hunks of silver to ship in ingots to Nuremberg, located outside Bohemia and therefore an illegal destination for Bohemian silver. The ingots were to pay off a debt of 34,000 Rhine florins that Schlick borrowed so he could live beyond his means. Schlick never paid off his loan in full, situating the dollar’s origin story in a familiar mire of insolvency.To pay for his operations, Schlick had to mint coins—crummy little silver pennies mixed with copper for his peasant employees, and big, prettily milled silver coins to pay dividends to his Saxon investors. The big coin, first created in 1520, was named the joachimsthaler after the Bohemian town where it came from, Joachimsthal (“the Valley of Saint Joachim”). The Saxon investors who received joachimsthaler dividends resided in Leipzig, a key center of finance and trade. That enabled the stateless and abundant joachimsthaler to spread far and wide. Within a decade, joachimsthaler were known familiarly as taler, a nickname later corrupted into dollar. “By the middle of the sixteenth century,” writes Greeley, “merchants in Leipzig, Hamburg, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and even Florence and Genoa had come to expect their silver in taler.” In 1566, the Holy Roman Empire, bowing to reality, adopted it as official currency.Meanwhile, Spaniards (specifically Castilians) were finding fantastic quantities of silver in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. They hired Saxons and Bohemians, by now Europe’s recognized silver experts, to mine it and mill it into a deliberate knockoff of the taler. The result was a real de a ocho (piece of eight), made to look like the taler, that came to be known as the Spanish dólar. Spanish dollars were made in even greater quantities than the joachimsthaler and its various other knockoffs minted throughout Europe. Extracted from the bottomless silver mines of the New World, the dólar eclipsed them all. By 1611, the coin was sufficiently familiar to Elizabethan audiences that William Shakespeare could spin wordplay out of it in The Tempest, with Sebastian speaking of “a dollar” and Gonzalo answering, “Dolour comes to him, indeed; you / have spoken truer than you purposed.”The Spanish dollar rocketed north to the American colonies because the Crown wouldn’t let its American territories mint or print currency. Urging London’s Council of Trade and Plantations to allow the Massachusetts Bay Colony to build a mint, Increase Mather and William Phips—shortly to become president of Harvard and governor of the colony, respectively—said there was “practically only Spanish money in New England.” When the new nation of the United States established a mint in 1792, Congress decreed that the U.S. dollar would be “of the value of the Spanish milled dollar.”“Congress did not create an American dollar,” Greeley argues. “It simply consented to the silver dollar that had already been in place well before the American Revolution.” Greeley scoffs at the notion of “fiat currency,” which says that governments create money. In Greeley’s telling, governments race to keep up with and control money’s creation by private opportunists, plunderers, and freelancers who see a need for money someplace and race to fill it. In the modern era, these players are commercial banks. Greeley recognizes the importance of the Federal Reserve, but he believes it’s the banks that manufacture dollars when they make loans. Greeley’s notion that banks create money is really a semantic difference, because the ability of banks to make loans has a lot to do with reserves supplied by the Fed and financed by loans that the Fed makes to the federal government through the purchase of Treasurys. But banks predate the Fed, which has only been around since 1913.Even after the United States started minting silver dollars, it allowed foreign silver dollars (mostly Spanish and, later, Mexican) to be circulated as legal tender until 1857. The timing was dictated by yet another matter of happenstance outside the government—the 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill. Over the next decade, the California Gold Rush doubled America’s quantity of gold and silver (for which gold could be traded), finally giving the United States enough precious metal to make all of its own dollars.Human agency is not entirely absent from Greeley’s story. Powerful East Coast bankers preferred a single gold standard to the existing silver-and-gold standard because it was less inflationary, and in 1873 Congress obliged by dropping its legal definition of a dollar as a fixed weight of silver, “severing,” Greeley writes, “the last remaining legal link to the joachimsthaler.” A Free Silver movement arose in the West to restore the silver standard and boost farm prices—inflation be damned. That was what the dollar wanted. But the bankers beat back these pitchfork-wielding Populists and proceeded (in the later words of William Jennings Bryan) to crucify the American farmer on a cross of gold. Restrained in the late nineteenth century from proliferating as fast as American farming was growing, the dollar yielded “a long, slow deflation,” with crop prices falling even as well-fed plutocrats ushered in what was, in more senses than one, a Gilded Age.Later, after the onset of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt seized control of the dollar in a more helpful way by extending federal insurance to bank deposits to lure out of hibernation money stashed in coffee cans and under mattresses. Greeley’s discussion of this breakthrough is a bit grudging, because it killed off small-town experiments to revive local commerce by issuing scrip.Still, the dollar does have an uncanny ability to slip the surly bonds of regulation. The foreign dollar, exiled in 1857, staged a comeback a century later with the postwar advent of eurodollars—not physical dollars but tradable ones, manufactured first in London and then elsewhere. This started as a way for large multinational American banks to get around the Fed when it moved to tighten the money supply to curb inflation. That large American bank could simply borrow money denominated in dollars from a British (or other foreign) bank. In effect, Greeley writes, foreign banks “were just doing exactly what banks in America had already been doing for a century and a half.” They were manufacturing dollars. The eurobond followed, wherein London banks issued dollar-denominated bonds. It was, writes Greeley, “a triumph of practice over theory.”If we ask, again, why other countries put up with our dollar, Greeley might answer: because it’s their dollar, too. Foreign countries can make and remake dollars for their own purposes. For example, it was the eurodollar that allowed postwar London to reestablish itself as a global capital market center after the pound had lost its status as a reserve currency. If a foreign bank runs into trouble with its eurodollars, the Fed will often step in with an emergency loan or some other intervention to keep a local dollar problem from going global. America’s exorbitant privilege can sometimes be an exorbitant burden.Greeley’s alternative history can, and probably will, be read as justification for minimal bank regulation in general and for unfettered cryptocurrency in particular. If the dollar has a mind of its own, why can’t bitcoin? But Greeley is no libertarian; he thinks American currency needs to be regulated much more aggressively, because, all the way back to when Stephan Schlick paid his miners in bad pennies, letting the dollar do what it wants usually means that very little money finds its way to those who need it most.The dollar is very difficult to control, but it is not uncontrollable. The United States demonstrates its governability whenever it weaponizes American currency to bully our friends into sanctioning our enemies. A better way to assert mastery over the dollar would be to allocate credit to better reach ordinary Americans. There are ways to achieve this without letting inflation run wild; the dollar is smart, but we humans are smarter. Sadly, the dollar has seldom been used to the betterment of humankind, not because our government lacked the ingenuity, but for the simpler and more depressing reason that it lacked the desire.

Everywhere I look, I see people expressing alarm about the popularity of socialism. It polls in the mid-to-high 30s, and considerably higher among younger people. Older people, who have a living memory of the various socialist regimes that once dotted the planet that at best didn’t deliver prosperity to their people and at worst threw them in jail by the thousands, can’t understand how this can be and seem to want to talk endlessly about it.I, however, marvel at the other consistent result of all these polls, which these people don’t seem nearly as interested in talking about. I refer to the ratings Americans give to capitalism. They’re terrible. A big Gallup poll from last fall is representative. Socialism won the approval of 39 percent, while capitalism’s positive number was 54 percent.That is pathetic—barely half the country! In the country that invented modern capitalism and where it is worshipped by the elite class. And you know what? It’s entirely deserved. In fact, it deserves to be a little worse (as it is among Democrats). The kind of capitalism we’ve been practicing in this country over the last 40-plus years is cruel, corrupt, and a perversion of what a humane capitalism ought to be. The people who are so freaked out about socialism ought to realize that the only way they’re going to arrest its rise is to change capitalism for the better.From the founding of the country until the stock market crash of 1929, the general belief was that government should be small and markets should not be regulated. Some people say it worked pretty well until 1929, but in fact that isn’t true. It worked well enough to perpetuate itself, because if capitalism is anything it’s elastic and dynamic, but that’s about it.First of all, 15 states had slavery up until it was prohibited, along with the obscene concentrations of wealth that came with that evil system. Also, throughout the nineteenth century, there were five major depressions and roughly 15 or 20 recessions. These downturns stemmed from a range of causes, but a common theme through many of them was the speculative bubble; that is to say, conmen trying to make a quick buck and bamboozle investors.After the Great Depression hit, Franklin Roosevelt hired a few thousand cops to police this beat, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission and other entities that kept an eye on Wall Street. Human nature being what it is, this did not create a nirvana, but it improved matters considerably. The New Deal did four other things that reined in capitalism and made it more humane. Roosevelt raised taxes on the rich, which had the dual benefits of bringing in more revenue and just being the right thing to do morally. He vastly increased public investment—Keynesianism—producing for example the water power that still delivers electricity to 10 million homes and businesses down in states where they curse the federal government and where a Democrat couldn’t get elected dogcatcher (its power sources today go beyond water to nuclear and gas). Third, he signed legislation that made it possible for many more workers to join unions, which gave them better wages and more humane working hours and conditions.Fourth—and this is as important as the first three but isn’t mentioned as often—he cracked down on monopoly power. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson created antitrust enforcement, but FDR really amped it up. In addition, his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights contained eight provisions. Most of them were rights he wished to confer upon people simply for being born: an adequate wage, a good education, decent health care. But one right was directed specifically at owners of businesses: “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.”And what happened as a result of these changes? What the economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo called “the Great Compression”: a roughly 30-year period when income gaps decreased as never before in this country or pretty much any other peer nation. In addition to the vast reduction in economic inequality, the economy did great, too, with GDP growth in the 1960s for example averaging around 4.5 percent a year. That was capitalism working at peak.Today? Capitalism is badly broken. At least four big things are wrong. First of all, it’s rapacious and corrupt, yes, but it is also, to use a word cold-blooded economists might actually care about, inefficient. There are young people in rural Appalachia, inner-city Detroit, or on a New Mexico reservation who might have the potential to grow up to cure Alzheimer’s or invent a nifty device or write a great novel. But the way we refuse to educate and invest in these kids, we’ll never know, and they’ll end up being hospital orderlies. Among other things, that’s inefficient. Second, monopoly power today is wildly out of control. And monopoly power, as FDR knew, is a complete bastardization of capitalism. It kills competition. It stifles shared prosperity. It gives rise to cronyism, corruption, and robber barons. These fraud-idiot free marketeers who bomb us with their propaganda and sing the praises of Adam Smith ought to take 10 minutes to go read about what an inveterate foe of monopoly Smith was. The damage done on this point to our country by Milton Friedman and Robert Bork (among others) is enormous, far greater than any socialist could inflict in his wildest dreams.Third, these vast fortunes are just sick. Would you like to venture a guess as to what Elon Musk was worth in 2015? Go ahead. I’ll wait.Ready? It was $13.9 billion. Today, as we all know, he briefly became the world’s first trillionaire, although I guess it depends on the day. That is sick. There is no other word for it. The same thing has happened with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and so many others. Their fortunes have increased tenfold or more in the past decade. They constitute an oligarchy that is gaining more political power every year.Fourth, technology has made it possible for corporations with bad intent to nickel-and-dime people in ways that just weren’t possible until the invention of these algorithms. People are getting hammered by hidden fees, all-but-secret subscription service price increases, and now, even surveillance pricing, which is just a disgusting practice. Brad Lipton of the Roosevelt Institute asks these disturbing and not-so-hypothetical questions:Should people with iPhones pay more than Android users for food delivery? Should delivery drivers earn different amounts for the same job, based on personal information the app has about them? Do we want nurses who staff shifts at hospitals bidding against each other for work, competing over who will accept the least amount of money? Should people who live in certain zip codes be charged more for online test prep? What about single parents?These four factors, among others, have given this country a capitalism today that is—well, to use Bernie Sanders’s favorite word, rigged. Everybody knows it. I believe capitalism has two compelling qualities that make it, to borrow from Churchill, less bad than all the other economic “-isms.” The first is that at its best, it fosters healthy competition. The old Econ 101 textbook thing about the guys starting shoe stores on opposite corners is, or should be, true. The one who offers a better product at a better price will thrive, and consumers will benefit. The other guy needs to go find something else to do, but that’s life, and usually, in a balanced economy that offers ample opportunity, he will.Second, capitalism does encourage innovation. It’s not a coincidence that most of the great inventions and scientific discoveries have happened in capitalist societies. Capitalism gives individuals room to experiment and tinker and grow. Of course, government can play a huge role here, too, with sufficient public investment in medicine, science, and related fields.We do have competition and innovation in the United States today. But we could have a lot more of both if we had the right people in office passing the right laws. What we mostly have is system in which hard-working middle-class people are feeling more and more left behind, and in which young people in particular see very little opportunity and are convinced that Social Security, the crown jewel of United States public policy, won’t exist when they hit 67. And that is why socialism is gaining in popularity.People who think they can stop this socialist renaissance by caviling about the state seizing the means of production or by issuing warnings about our becoming like Bolivia are going to get exactly nowhere. Those kinds of arguments are theoretical and very remote from people’s daily lives.Anyone who’s interested in stopping socialism needs to work on fixing capitalism. If we had a more humane capitalism in which workers made a solid wage; in which basic health care was a right and was free or at least affordable; in which the government was investing in the small towns where opportunity has vanished; in which those kids in Appalachia and Detroit and New Mexico were given the tools they need to fulfill their potential; in which the very rich were appropriately taxed; if we had these things, socialism wouldn’t be so popular. Any foe of socialism who doesn’t see this and isn’t working to change capitalism just isn’t a serious person. If the form of capitalism that we have now in this country continues unchecked and unchanged, socialism’s popularity will rise and rise. In this sense, the uber-capitalists and all those who ignore these deformities are dooming themselves, perpetuating a system that … well, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Didn’t a famous guy once say that?