This article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky's work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

The years following the financial crisis of 2008 have witnessed a revival of interest in both the Polanyian concept of ‘fictitious commodities’ and the Marxian concept of ‘fictitious capital’. The former, with its focus on the consequences of markets for the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labour, and money, appears as a plausible explanation for our present instability along environmental, social, and economic axes. The latter, with its focus on what sets financial capitalists apart from their industrial counterparts, sheds light on what really separates Wall Street from Main Street, and what it all means for the prospects of class struggle in the 21st century. Building on a decade and a half of discourse on the role of these phenomena in financialisation, this paper explores the kinds of limits the law can place on high finance’s most flagrant flights of fancy. Taking as case studies the post-crisis efforts by the European Union (EU) to intervene in two key financial markets – private equity and securitisation – it asks how far current regulatory frameworks go, and what more can be done to protect Europe from capitalism’s excesses.