“The things you and I depend on in the real world became investment vehicles. Homes, oil, resources … the costs of all these things went up not because of any real laws of supply and demand, but because they had become new classes of investment.”

Douglas Rushkoff recently posted some interesting thoughts about money:
US Dollar

Our highly corporatized society was really forged during the Renaissance. Aristocrats were losing power just as a new merchant class was gaining it. So they made a series of deals through which merchants’ companies were granted monopoly charters from the monarchs in return for a sweet cut of the proceeds. Merchants got to lock in their status as newly rich, while monarchs stopped their own descent. Merchants supported the monarchs whose charters granted them exclusive access to new territories or industries, and monarchs got to do colonial expansion once-removed.

The invention of centralized, national currency was meant to support all this. Where localities had previously been free to mint their own currency based on the crops they had grown, now they were forced to borrow money from a central bank. This allowed the issuer of currency — the crown — to extract value from every transaction. Anyone who wanted to buy anything from anyone else had to run it through the central authority — coin of the realm — one way or the other.

- Douglas Rushkoff @ Boing Boing: Link.