You're right that a lot of finance is mostly smoke and mirrors. I send you money through my bank, but what actually happens is that debt gets moved around, rath

You're right that a lot of finance is mostly smoke and mirrors. I send you money through my bank, but what actually happens is that debt gets moved around, rather than money. The result is that it looks like I have less money and you have more. And it gets even more tricky when I start paying you back for the loan on my house - you sell off a bundle of loans to someone else, who says that the bundle of loans they bought is a good investment, because now they own debt which is the primary market commodity. Now, there's a market that's built on there being a predictable ratio of payers to defaulters, which makes it easy to calculate how much the commodity is worth. But we do get the benefit of the trickery - I can go buy shoes at a store because the employees are paid out of debt, rather than out of the store's profits (which are mostly reinvested into other capital that, hopefully, exceeds the debt). Without the debt, and the ability of the market to utilize it as a commodity, I wouldn't be able to participate in mass-market purchasing, and thus my $50 shoes would cost $200