There are signs of the times (Mt. 16: 2–4), which, despite their obviousness, those who examine the signs in the heavens do not succeed in perceiving. They are crystallised in events that herald and define the coming epoch, events that can pass unobserved and almost in no way alter the reality to which they are added; yet which, precisely because of this, count as signs, as historical indices, sēmeia ton kairōn. One of these events took place on 15 August 1971, when the American government, under the presidency of Richard Nixon, declared that the convertibility of the dollar into gold had been suspended. Although this declaration signalled the end of a system that had always bound monetary value to the gold standard, the news, which arrived at the height of the summer holidays, elicited far less discussion than one would have expected. Yet, from that moment on, the inscription that we still read on many banknotes (for example, on the pound sterling and the rupiah, but not on the euro) – ‘I promise to pay the bearer the sum of …’, countersigned by the governor of the central bank – had definitively lost its meaning. This sentence now meant that, in exchange for the note, the central bank could have provided to whomever requested it (conceding that someone would have been so foolish as to do so), not a particular amount of gold (for the dollar, a thirty-fifth of an ounce), but a note exactly the same. Money was emptied of every value that was not purely self-referential. This makes the ease with which the American sovereign's gesture was accepted, which amounted to liquidating the gold assets of money owners all the more stupefying. And if, as has been suggested, the exercise of monetary sovereignty on the part of a state consists in its capacity to lead market actors to spend its debts like money, even that debt had now lost any real consistency: it had become pure paper.

The process of dematerialisation of money had begun many centuries earlier when market demands led to the issuing of letters of exchange, banknotes, juros, goldsmiths’ notes and so on, alongside the necessarily scarce and cumbersome metal currency.