The American republic is 250 years old today. On this auspicious anniversary, the story of Alexander Hamilton, the birth of the dollar and the emergence of what would become the economic behemoth that is the American republic is worth retelling because the story of America is the story of money.

Once they’d figured out the constitutional basis of the US, the most significant move undertaken by the founding fathers was to create a new currency. The American revolutionaries passed the Coinage Act on April 2nd, 1792, under the direction of Alexander Hamilton, the smartest economic mind of all the rebels.

Romantics like Thomas Jefferson possessed an almost elegiac view of America, where the new republic would be rural and isolated, uncorrupted by money, markets and finance. In contrast, Hamilton, always the modernist, saw a capitalist US, competing with the Europeans in industry, commerce and trade.

As the first Treasury Secretary of the US, Hamilton had no time for the nostalgic sentimentality of Jefferson, Sam Adams and James Madison. In the early 1790s, he saw that hyperinflation was hijacking the French Revolution, which was morphing from a thoughtful, bourgeois uprising to a murderous, guillotine-fuelled, Jacobin blood-fest.

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Hamilton knew America needed a sound currency to........

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