In the 1970s, due to the Nixon administration’s decision to abolish the gold standard, money entered into an ontological crisis. This crisis has reverberated, via an avalanche of other financial events in the decade and after, all the way into the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I consider various novels (and some films as well) that point to deep philosophical relations between the kinds of questions that money’s post-1970 ontological crisis opens up, and the art of fiction-writing. These relations are especially evident in the tensions between literary realism – exemplified in the field by Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) – and postmodernism, which comes to challenge realism in the early 1970s, exactly when money’s ontological crisis opens up. Whereas the realist project, which has seen a revival after the 2007–8 global market crash, seeks to provide epistemological responses to money’s ongoing crisis – a descriptive and explanatory project that is necessary, even if it may be doomed to failure – post-1970s postmodernism and more experimental fiction are better placed to engage money’s ontological crisis, which has laid bare the ways in which money exceeds what we can know about it and demands a realism that is speculative – like contemporary finance itself.

Chapter 6 traces the last years of Britain’s communal currency. From the chapter’s examination of the resumption debate, it emerges that the decision on resumption stemmed from loss of faith in inconvertible currency and the fractured state of British society, rather than from unanimous support for the theory or policy of the gold standard. This chapter reveals that the supporters of resumption were a mixed group of people, including those with metallist and non-metallist views alike. The anti-resumption campaign lacked coherence, but ultimately it was the fractured state of British society that made inconvertible currency unsustainable: Britain’s note users no longer saw themselves as a single community of money users but as competing groups with different economic interests. The rest of the chapter illustrates the process by which the remnants of communal currency were gradually chipped away in the following twelve years, which were punctuated by major events such as the financial crisis of 1825 and the political run on the Bank of England in 1832. This chapter closes in 1833, when the fate of currency voluntarism was finally sealed as the Bank note became legal tender.

This Chapter introduces the Railroad Era and the financial and regulatory changes spawned by Richard Trevithick’s steam-powered locomotive. In particular, railroads illustrate how technological innovations, like the steam engine and rail car, often require financial innovations to bring the new technology to market because not only is production of the product itself expensive, but it also requires enormous investments in infrastructure like the Transcontinental Railroad. For example, preferred stock was invented to make railroad financing more appealing to governmental investors, but it was quickly adopted for many different purposes. Although the idea of using public funds to purchase railroad stock was unpopular with legislatures in the beginning, constituents soon began to demand access to this preference and additional rights. Additionally, as the acrimony between Federalists and anti-federalists persisted throughout the era, another financial evolution was primed to take place–the abandonment of the gold standard. Federalization of the money system continued as the United States attempted to better control its economy by adopting the gold standard.