Money can be anything - like cigarettes - which helps you account for what you need to buy. It can be something valuable, like coins. It can be something scarce like gold, with intrinsic value. It can be something sophisticated and elastic like shares or copper futures. It can be something that can be accidentally deleted by your bank just because someone sits on the keyboard (this happens surprisingly often). And sometimes it can be a bit of all of these, like the gold that the Spanish 'conquistadores' found in Latin America, extracted from the Incas and shipped back to Europe. Almost anything can be used as money.
The trouble for us is that money is a bit of all those things. It is coins and it is debt. It is credit card plastic and it is infinite bytes and bytes and bytes in cyberspace - the place where banks actually keep our deposits.
Except that for some of us, money is a good deal more elastic than it is for others. While the poorest people in the world make do with the equivalent of a few pence a day, the 'masters of the universe' in Wall Street and the City of London - as Tom Wolfe called them in The Bonfire of the Vanities - have a money system that is almost infinitely elastic. When the rogue financier Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht in the Bay of Biscay in 1991, he had stretched his money so much that he owed twice as much as Zimbabwe. Of all the great injustices of the money system, that is the heart of it. For some people money is stretchy, insubstantial and infinite, for others it is horribly concrete. Some people make and remake the rules; some people die by them.
