A finance system exists, socially, only to direct money to where it is needed to create more social good. It has no purpose otherwise. It is not an end in itself.  Money that is not a useful commodity (aka. food) is not a store of value, and never was. It is a fiction used to allow feedback in the system and to act as a distribution mechanism for goods and services based on perceived social utility (aka, people who have more money are assumed to have more social utility).

A society which understands NONE of these points will vastly mis-allocate its productive resources, as, currently, ours is. That mis-allocation will, in time, lead to collapse or another disaster (in the much larger picture here, much of the world is now in both a pre-revolutionary state and a pre-war state, though most people won't believe either until they're dying).

I have spent my entire life watching these people burn down the house to generate heat and call themselves geniuses. Neoliberalism "works" because it bribes just enough people to maintain enough of a constituency, while piling money into the hands of a very few people who will do anything to keep it going because that's how they became filthy rich, and virtually any system which cared about the common good would take their money and power away from them.

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'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty