The U.S. dollar, as we know it today, was born in terror. On April 18, 1906, the Pacific tectonic plate, which extends under the ocean from Japan to central California, darted northward about 20 feet in just under a minute; in San Francisco, buildings that were not shattered by the earthquake burned, and within two days, 80 percent of the city was gone. At the time, American companies and governments still bought insurance from the old British firms, and the payouts to San Francisco were enormous. As was standard practice, the insurers paid in gold, shipping $65 million worth of bars — an estimated 107 tons, representing 14 percent of all British gold reserves — to the Bay Area. Afraid that all that gold leaving its vaults would permanently impoverish the kingdom, the Bank of England doubled interest rates on British bonds. In response, so many wealthy Americans sent money to England that, a few months after the gold came west from London, $30 million in U.S. gold traveled east. The British vaults were replenished, while the U.S. stock fell by 10 percent in two months.

Back then, dollar bills were printed by local banks, not the government, and each bill was a claim on the actual gold sitting in a specific bank’s vault. With all that gold hurtling to and fro, many Americans grew suspicious that their banks no longer had enough. There were runs, and dozens of financial institutions failed in what was the country’s worst financial panic to that point — which is saying quite a bit, because the country had weathered major financial crises every generation since its founding. It took the nation’s most powerful banker, J. P. Morgan, to resolve the crisis. Summoning the treasury secretary to his home on 36th Street, he explained that the government and a consortium of bankers would bail out the system by, among other things, bringing $36 million in gold to New York City. (The Times, in a November 1907 headline, referred to him as “A Bank in Human Form”; the article described him as “moving the pieces on the financial chess board at will, whether they were kings or pawns.”) Americans thought their economic lives were built on a solid foundation of gold. Now, suddenly, they learned that the only thing of enduring value was the will of one rich man.

To ensure this would never happen again, Congress created a new entity, the Federal Reserve System, whose experts would manage the value of the dollar by setting key interest rates. That system worked far better than anybody imagined it would. Few people then — and few people now — could actually describe what it is that the Fed does (in a poll in late 2014, fewer than 24 percent of Americans could pick Janet Yellen as the current head of the Fed from a list of four names, less than would be expected by pure chance). But somehow we have come to accept that the invisible panel of experts, with their confusing statements about interest rates, knows what it is doing. The dollar has performed remarkably well under their power, and indeed the Fed is a part of the reason the United States became the dominant global economy in the 20th century. Before its creation, many bet on Argentina as the major new world economy. I remember a professor of the history of religion once saying that global confidence in the dollar is the greatest example of collective faith in an abstract symbol in human history. The dollar, under the Fed, has achieved something no god, no prophet, no messiah has been able to do.

It would have been understandable if faith in the dollar had wavered after the financial crisis of 2008. After all, the crisis began in the United States, at least in part as a result of bad Fed policy. For well over a year, the Fed was constantly behind, delivering obtuse assertions of health about a financial system that was collapsing. But the dollar itself never faltered. Confidence in currencies is measured in various ways — by inflation, by the interest rate governments have to pay to borrow, by the exchange rate with other currencies and so on. For years now, the dollar has performed better than at almost any point in history on all of these measures. Seven years after a U.S. financial crisis nearly brought down the world economy, confidence in the dollar has never been stronger.