All monetary savings is a fiction. A nation’s only savings are its natural resources, its built physical infrastructure, stable social norms and government credibility. Individuals can of course save money, but on a collective scale, a pot of 1s and 0s don’t get us anything.
I’m not saying money is an illusion, a story or a collective myth or anything like that you might read in a crypto medium post. I’m saying that for a nation in crisis, there’s no collective pot of money we just draw on. What we draw on are functioning institutions and resources.
Imagine we let hundreds of thousands of small businesses incinerate and for people to lose their skills and relationships over time. All the 1s and 0s in the world can’t make up for that.
Another way of saying it is that we need to spend tons of money to preserve microstructures (an individual’s relationship to their employe, to their homes etc) because if that all breaks, there’s no amount of money that can rebuild the system as a whole.
