After earning his PhD at Columbia during the Great Depression, Charles Kindleberger spent 12 years in public service before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948, where he taught international economics until mandatory retirement in 1976. Initially a central figure in the department, he became increasingly marginal to its eventual mission of “policy analysis with rigour”, even as his external profile increased steadily, in political science and economic history specifically, and also among the general public who made his 1978 Manias, Panics, and Crashes a bestseller. Here, it is argued that Kindleberger’s main contribution to economics was to develop further the key currency approach to international money, a minority view during his years in academia but one that subsequent history has validated.