Circular and self reinforcing. Why does anything have value, because people believe it does ("Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States"). If yo

Circular and self reinforcing. Why does anything have value, because people believe it does ("Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States"). If you step back a bit to the meta IOU level. There's a fixed (but changing all the time) amount of IOUs in circulation... and since you can transfer IOUs you end up with ownership. You can get more meta here, and say what is ownership? Ownership is really not a natural / physical law. Instead it's a series of laws and social conversion that we created and agreed upon. Why our brains made us do that is prob a good question of evolutionary biologist who study primates (since some can be thought to use money).