As for the general interest in money (the stuff), perhaps it is a struggle to see something socially created as "real". For sure money exists, and it's value is as a result of us thinking it's real, rather than being linked to gold or silver.
Sure. But to come at this from several angles:
Firstly, I don't think most people understand what a fiat currency is. Or fractional reserve banking. When these things are explained to them they are typically incredulous and then appalled. In most of the population there is a tacit but completely erroneous assumption that it must all rest on something a lot more concrete. Perhaps due to ignorance but surely also due to the fact that although fiat currencies have been flirted with for 900 years, they only really became dominant in 1971. This is a very new experiment, and one that makes many people instinctively uncomfortable.
Add to that the trend over the same period for the growing perception of money as a universal value system. We're now in a place where it seems impossible to express value in terms other than money. The worth of everything gets reduced to a cash value. That very narrow definition excludes but much of what makes actually makes life valuable. That we seem unable to question this as a society devalues these things further. Success today equals being rich. As I wrote a few pages back, what is it then that money is valuing? It's valuing the potential to make more money.
Money may be imaginary, but how else are you going to exchange stuff including your time?
To widen the context money is only real (as I mentioned a few pages ago) within the context of the economy. The economy is a subset of human society and human society is but a small subset of the biosphere - which is the real capital underlying all this. The economy is having a profound negative effect on the biosphere without any way to account for it. I'm sure some economists think it could given political will. I think this is profound hubris and only reflects a misunderstanding of the complexity of the natural world. This ability of money to move work and resources around in time can't just be viewed a bringing the benefits of modern life - the flipside is the destruction of the biosphere.
Thanks for the link - I was initially inclined to dismiss it but the comment thread is very interesting and touches on most of my beefs. Not many supportive comments are there! To attack the reality of modern money from a more economic perspective then, I guess this link from those comments is a much more expert critique than I can muster:
https://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/from-marx-to-goldman-sachs-the-fictions-of-fictitious-capital1/
Be interested in your thoughts.
TL
R, you can go back to Marx who thought the value of money was derived from labour. Perhaps it was then, it isn't now. Such industrial capital did not dominate over finance as Marx expected, but the reverse happened, accelerating in the fiat currency era. Now money's value is based primarily on the ability to generate interest, rent or appreciation. It is self-referential, lacks solid foundation in physical reality, and being mostly wishful thinking given a number value is therefore highly prone to boom and bust. But it has such a grip on modern thought that we bailed the fuckers out.
"Marx characterized high finance as based on “fictitious” claims for payment in the first place because it consists not of the means of production, but of bonds, mortgages, bank loans and other claims on the means of production."
"Finance capital is fictitious in the second place because its demands for payment cannot be met as economy-wide savings and debts mount up exponentially. The “magic of compound interest” diverts income away from being spent on goods or services, capital equipment or taxes. “In all countries of capitalist production,” Marx wrote, the “accumulation of money-capital signifies to a large extent nothing else but an accumulation of such claims on production, an accumulation of the market-price, the illusory capital-value, of these claims.”
"Discussing the 1857 financial crisis, Marx showed how unthinkable anything like the 2008-09 Bush-Obama bailout of financial speculators appeared in his day. “The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values.” [15] Marx wrote this reductio ad absurdum not dreaming that it would come true in autumn 2008 as the U.S. Treasury paid off all of A.I.G.’s gambles and other counterparty “casino capitalist” losses at taxpayer expense, followed by the Federal Reserve buying junk mortgage packages at par."
I've not studied economics so this is probably 101 and taken as read. But it doesn't seem to be common knowledge.