A closer look
Thomas Gresham gets all the historical glory for "Gresham's Law"—the famous rule that bad money drives out good—but he absolutely didn't invent it. The concept was actually documented decades earlier by Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who figured out the Earth orbits the Sun and still had time to be a better economist than actual bankers. A 19th-century economist just slapped Gresham's name on it because Gresham had whined about it in a letter to Queen Elizabeth. In the ultimate financial irony, the "bad" attribution drove out the "good" one.
