In the mid-1960s, money manager George J.W. Goodman began to write a series of irreverent and witty columns for New York magazine under the borrowed name of capitalism’s founding theorist, Adam Smith. As “Adam Smith,” Goodman went on to write several bestsellers about economics, the stock market, and global capitalism, including The Money Game, Supermoney, and Paper Money, from which this account of the origin of the modern currency market is excerpted.