In an era when innovation in money and its various market dynamics is advancing at unprecedented speed, Western heroic optimism about the potentials that are unleashed by the logics of the world monetary system is distinctly tinged with fear: of massive outstanding deficits, whirlwind destruction of smaller economies, a roller-coaster rise on Wall Street, and sheer inappositeness to large numbers of development challenges. Old financial institutions have to create new forms of credit to address, for example, the transformation of the former socialist economies or the restoration of war-torn societies and polities. The enormous power of formal finance and its equally enormous limitations, and the contentious set of regulatory frameworks that surround both, should stimulate a new round of scholarship about what used to be termed ‘finance capital’ in modern social history.