Wealth & Money Quote by John Buchanan Robinson

“Modern money is almost altogether credit money” lands like a quiet warning disguised as a bookkeeping note. Robinson, writing from the vantage of a late-19th/early-20th century politician, is pointing at a structural shift that many citizens could feel but not always name: wealth was no longer anchored primarily in coins or notes you could hold, but in promises, ledgers, and institutional trust.

The specific intent is corrective. He’s trying to snap his audience out of a comforting, physical picture of money as “stuff” and toward the reality of money as a relationship. Credit money isn’t counterfeit; it’s socially authorized IOUs circulating at scale, made spendable by banks, law, and expectation. That “almost altogether” is doing rhetorical work: it suggests the change is not marginal but dominant, and therefore politically consequential.

The subtext is about power and fragility. If money is mostly credit, then the real engine is confidence - and the people who manufacture and manage confidence (banks, central authorities, large borrowers) quietly gain leverage over everyone else. It also hints at how crises happen: when faith cracks, “money” can evaporate without a single bill being burned, because what’s collapsing is the agreement beneath the numbers.

Contextually, Robinson is speaking amid industrial expansion, banking consolidation, and recurring panics. The line reads like an early map of today’s financialized world: salaries, mortgages, corporate growth, even government capacity increasingly mediated through credit. He’s not romanticizing gold; he’s underlining that modern economies run on belief - and that belief is never apolitical.