Why This Matters
Money is not neutral. It is a force—one that has built empires and destroyed nations–nobody knows that better than Haitians. It has created wealth for some, debt for others. It is not just a tool; it is a weapon, wielded by those who understand its rules against those who do not.
This series is for anyone who has ever held a dollar bill and wondered about the power behind it. It is for the Haitian worker watching their paycheck shrink under inflation, the entrepreneur navigating interest rates, the student trying to understand why the cost of living never stops rising.
Money is more than what we earn. It is the story of our world. And it is time we start reading it carefully.
Below is an outline of what I will cover in this series dedicated to a deeper understanding of money and banking. The series is U.S. focused becaused it’s the one I know best. Many friends have hounded me over the years to write a book (just for them!) on how money and banking works. No books in my horizon but since i already have this website as a collection of my thoughts on various subjects, I figured why not? The goal here is to make it easier to understand the financial pages (and all those jargons you hear on business channels like CNBC) and to save $30k by learning everything I was taught in business school.
I. The First Lie We Tell Ourselves About Money
Most of us like money. Some of us worship it. But few of us ever stop to ask the question: What is money, really?
An object? A number? A belief?
Economists would tell you that money is a contract—a quiet agreement between people, inked not in blood–though Haitian history would say otherwise–but in trust. It is the scaffolding of commerce, the breath of markets. Without it, civilization stutters and stalls. But for something so central to our lives, money remains a mystery, shrouded in myths and the rituals of the powerful.
I will attempt to strip back those illusions. To interrogate what money is, how it moves, and who it serves.
II. The Story of Money: From Gold to the Fiat Illusion
The earliest money was physical—gold, silver, things you could hold, weigh, and bite between your teeth. But over time, we moved from the tangible to the invisible.
The second article in this series will trace that shift, from money backed by commodities to the paper promises we use today. What happens when money is unshackled from gold? What does it mean that a government can print wealth into existence?
In the next article, I turn our gaze to America’s monetary history, a history shaped by constant conflict—Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Main Street vs. Wall Street, the eternal question of how much control the federal government should have over the flow of money.
And because power is never satisfied, I will also explore the strange world of alternative currencies and shadow banking—systems that operate beyond the reach of Washington, outside the confines of conventional finance.
I will look at sòl and Haitian shadow banking. While sòl and shadow banking both exist outside traditional finance, I’ll show that sòl is a communal, trust-based system, whereas the various shadow banking efforts in Haitian culture are often high-risk, profit-driven mechanisms often prone to financial crises.
III. Inflation, Hyperinflation, and the Death of Money
If money is a promise, inflation is the slow betrayal.
A creeping, quiet theft. A dollar buys less, then even less. It is why, when you hear your grandparents speak of gas for a quarter or bread for a dime, it sounds like a fable.
But hyperinflation? That is something darker. It is the moment the lie collapses, when faith in money is shattered completely. We will examine history’s greatest monetary failures—Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Venezuela—and ask how a government’s own actions can bring its currency to ruin. ( I wanted to add Haiti to the list of monetary failures but there is so little written on it; and, I don’t have the bandwidth to do original research at the moment. Maybe that’s a topic for a book down the line?)
IV. The Money Men: Banks, Markets, and the Institutions That Shape Our Lives
At some point, money becomes too large to be held in a hand, too powerful to be understood as just paper and coin. It lives in institutions now—in banks, in markets, in systems too vast for any single person to grasp.
And yet, these systems are fragile.
I explore how financial firms and commercial banks work, why central banks exist, and the responsibilities they hold (and sometimes fail to uphold). How do banks create money? Who decides how much is too much? What does it mean when the Fed moves interest rates, and why do markets tremble in response?
V. The Great Gamble: Bonds, Stocks, and the Business of Risk
The stock market is not the economy, and yet it shapes the economy all the same.
I enter the speculative world of stock markets, bonds, and risk—the world where fortunes are made and lost in seconds. What determines the price of a stock? Why do market bubbles form, and what happens when they burst?
From the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 (I know many Haitians who were hurt by this), to the ongoing debates over cryptocurrency, I will look at financial collapses past and future.
VI. The Future of Money: Crisis, Control, and the Questions That Remain
The financial system, as we know it, was not built to last forever.
This series concludes with the questions that will shape the coming decades:
- Will America solve its growing debt crisis?
- Can the euro survive?
- What happens when a bank becomes too big to fail?
- Should central banks have more control—or less?
As we stand at the edge of the digital age, where AI and decentralized finance threaten to upend everything we know about money, the final lecture asks: Are Haitians ready?