The other day, it struck me that I hadn’t used some money that I had allocated to my Roth IRA. There is an intermediate account that funds go to before they turn into shares. Since I forgot to move it, here my money sat in money purgatory. I logged into my Brokerage Inc. account and bought some shares of Index Fund. I’m not particularly financially savvy; I know enough to feel like I get to retire in America. That said, there are some gains in my investments thus far. These gains were displayed in the UI of my Brokerage Inc. account.

Seeing these gains, I felt kind of slimey. I felt icky for having been essentially paid to have money. I felt icky because I received compensation despite having created no value in the world. I don’t think investment in and of itself is evil. Let’s take 2 scenarios:

1. I am a baron or duke or other man of means. You, the reader, want to start Business Co. I, as I am hyper-wealthy, lend you $10. You turn this $10 into $20. You pay me back the loan plus $5 — totalling $15.

2. I am, again, hyper-wealthy. I buy ten shares in Big Business Corp. at $1 a piece. BBC goes gangbusters doing whatever it does wherever it does and 1.5x in value. I now have $15.

Feel free to add zeroes to these examples until you feel the gravity of them. In one example, I wield my fictitious wealth to enable a business to operate, in the other, I hitch a ride to grow my wealth while people who only care about money get a commission.

The very musings I just gave you, the reader, I gave to a colleague of mine. He is much more financially savvy than I am. Paraphrasing him, he said that stocks (and ETFs and index funds) are legally backed ownership of a company. He made it clear that the money paid for a stock doesn’t go to the company as a loan. He said, “you purchase the stock because you want to own part of a company you think will increase in value.” At this point in the conversation, I wasn’t angry or heated, but I was having a good time arguing against the man. So, I exclaimed, “This is just baseball cards bro!”

He quickly retorted, “Money is just baseball cards!” And this made me think (obviously, I’m writing about it). Here, we have to take a trip down “Money is fake” lane. I used to work for a cryptocurrency start up. I’ve never been a “crypto-bro”, but I think that decentralized, cryptographically assured value transfer is a cool idea. I also think that fiat currency is very much a “the best we have, but also what is prescribed by geopolitical super powers” value transfer tool. I personally haven’t been burned by the short comings of my governments currency, at the time of writing. However, it has happened plenty. This is all to say, being very reductive to my own thoughts and argument, “Money is fake.”

So, is money baseball cards? Is fiat currency just some stupid value store that we have all said has value because Barry Manilow had a great hitting season for the Chicago Nicks in the 70s? Where, a dollar bill has little value to anyone outside of the American economy. You can’t eat it. You can’t plant it. You could start a fire? The same kind of goes for stocks. If a solar wind takes out all tech tomorrow, all the assets you had tied up in stocks will afford you no grain at the farmer’s market. A mattress of cash will serve you little in the end times — Or will it? I don’t think money is baseball cards. I think money is Pokemon cards.

Baseball cards are little glossy cards that have a picture of a baseball player on one side and their player statistics on the other. The value of these cards has some to do with the popularity of the player the card is based on. It also has to do with condition, print, rarity, and most importantly demand. I would be remiss here to not interject that I don’t care about professional baseball or the card stock relics to its idols. All the same, these cards represent “America’s Pastime” to many Americans. But, all the value is speculative like a particular other financial tool we recently spoke about.

Pokemon cards are similarly glossy pieces of card stock showing fun art of the creatures bearing the same name. The value of these cards also has the popularity of creature on the card, condition, print, rarity, and most importantly demand. However, there is more value yet. There is value in the utility of these cards. These cards are based on very popular video game where you could make the aforementioned creatures battle. Like in the game, these cards can be used to play a turn based battling card game. Here, I would be remiss to not interject that both the video game and the card game are very fun and special to me. All the same, far and away from the speculative aspect of the value of these cards as value stores, these cards have significant utility as a game device.

Money (fiat currency) is similar in this way. People treat it as a speculative asset at times; I remember my grandma “investing” in the Iraqi Dinar. Still, money has utility. Even in the end times, those of us who remember civilization could probably maintain a loose economic system that respect some form of bank notes. This would be great for allowing simple transactions for good that are hard to barter or trade. Currency exists for the mechanism of easing trade. It would be awfully hard for me to trade Software Engineering for exactly 12 eggs, but all us citizens agreeing that 12 eggs is about $5 simplifies things.

So, yes money and stocks are both financial constructs. This makes them also social and, more importantly, human constructs. Since they are “constructs” they can feel “fake”. This leads naturally to their comparison to something trivial like trading cards. While I mostly agree, I think that trivializing “currency as value transfer” to the same degree as “fractionalized ownership for accelerating capitalism” turns a nose up to utility. So, money is not baseball cards. Money is Pokemon cards.