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What is happening? It’s tempting to blame the money mutations of the past year on the coronavirus and to see the financial bets on Robinhood and the soaring prices of NFTs as the anguished outcries of the bored, locked down, and anhedonic — people who might otherwise be betting on the Jets to cover the spread.
For most of us, at least until recently, money was a way of sorting out which kind of life you could lead. Where you lived, what you ate, how much free time you had — these were all functions of how much money you had. Money was a scarce and precious resource; to amass more, you were told, you needed to be responsible.
If you were going to choose a moment when money became unstuck in the popular imagination — when it stopped being entirely serious and started being, at least a little, funny — you could do worse than an interview that then–Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke gave to 60 Minutes in 2009. Asked if the money the Fed was injecting into banks in the wake of the global financial crisis was “taxpayer money,” Bernanke shook his head and grinned sheepishly.
If crisis had opened the door to a new way of thinking about money, the checks closed the door on the old: Gone was an understanding of money as a scarce, quasi-natural resource to be managed disinterestedly by apolitical experts.
Money is money...
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