Alexander Hamilton was America’s first Secretary of Treasury under President George Washington. When he first entered office in 1789, America was an agricultural nation of just 4 million still broke from its financially costly victory over the British Empire in the Revolutionary War. The states had accumulated relatively massive debts to finance that war, which mostly remained unpaid. The United States did not even have a national currency, with Spanish coins still in wide circulation and use. Steve Forbes explains in his recently published definitive work, Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy and What We Can Do About It, “America’s finances were in a state of disarray after the wild inflation resulting from massive money printing during the American Revolution.” As a result, “Hamilton faced the challenge of restoring the economy of the young republic that had been devastated by the Revolutionary War….” When money serves as a stable measure of value, it most clearly expresses the value of everything in terms of everything else.
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