I attribute my enduring interest in money and banking,
political economy, and economic history to the troubled
economic conditions of my youth. Born in 1969 in
Rochester, New York, to two self-proclaimed factory
rats, I recall little of my earliest days except the Great
Inflation and oil embargo, which stretched the family
budget past the breaking point. The recession in the
early 1980s also injured my family’s material welfare
and was seared into my brain. My only vivid,
noneconomic memories are of the Planet of the Apes films
(all five of them!) and the 1972 Olympics massacre in
Munich; my very young mind conflated the two because
of the aural similarity of the words gorilla and guerilla.
