Most people find that what they really like about money is more of it, but only Americans started with a clean slate and a belief that if only they could hit on the right formula their dreams would come true. They experimented with money as no other nation ever had the chance to: wampum, paper currency, private bank notes, gold and
silver, government money, bank money. On the way, the people learned to strike a deal, fix a price, watch their interests. They learned how to conjure money not out of the thin air exactly, but out of the natural riches of the land and the
ingenuity of their own minds, and fell to arguing how much, relatively speaking, it was worth.
Settling that dispute, over the years, defined them as a nation.