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A purely “monetary” exchange market is problematic in several ways. The first has to do with the nature of money, which should be merely the unit of account for all the circulating goods within a given economy. However, money can too easily be manipulated apart from the market for real goods and services. The Americans have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that trillions of dollars in financial wealth can be created without having any relation whatsoever to real wealth. Men who contributed not so much as a grain of wheat to the commonwealth are paid billions from the common purse in reward for their failure. And this was done by men operating in largely unregulated markets. Money, as a unit of account, is an abstraction, and the more abstracted an economy becomes, that is, the more monetized, the more easily it may be manipulated by those “in the know” about the mechanics of abstraction, and a completely monetized economy is the easiest of all to manipulate.

AZspot: Capitalism as an Unnatural System

Surely this misunderstands the nature of money which, as Marx argues, is merely an expression of value (value, in turn, being a social relation). Not only can trillions of dollars in financial wealth be created without any relation to “real wealth” (whatever that is), but under neoliberal capitalism, dependent as it is upon the primacy of finance capital over production capital, it is an inevitable outcome.

Source: azspot