Vapour wealth

Conceptual is the word and it is a description rather than an insult, since financial wealth genuinely is conceptual and the term simply declines to pretend otherwise. Nothing is tied to physical property, so what is held is a claim that others recognize. Wealth in Marsh's glossary is an accumulation of social approval, abstracted or otherwise, and vapour wealth is the fully abstracted form of exactly that. Currency supplies the mechanism, being abstract dissociated approval allowing access to all the benefits of a society without contribution, membership or acceptance of its values, and vapour wealth is what accumulating that approval produces. The consequence Marsh draws is about dependence rather than illusion. If wealth is stored approval then it exists only for as long as the approval is extended, which is why she treats even powerful states as susceptible to the world's approval and points to what sanctions do. Nothing about the holding is secure in the way a physical possession is, and the appearance of security comes from the consensus being stable rather than from the holding being solid. The framework's account of billionaires belongs here too, since they function as the anima bank of wealth endo-idealism, which is a repository of stored approval defended with the vehemence usually given to religious figures. That defence is what the arrangement requires, since a bank whose contents are conceptual survives only as long as it is believed in.

The distinction between financial and real assets is standard in economics, and financialization research documents the growth of claims relative to production, with the ratio of financial assets to output rising sharply over recent decades. Credit theories of money hold that money has always been a record of obligation rather than a commodity, which supports the conceptual reading. Bubbles and their collapse are studied as failures of shared belief. Marsh's addition is to route the concept through approval rather than through obligation, which makes wealth a stock of social recognition and accounts for why its holders require defending rather than merely protecting.