The reasons why capital never accurately measures the value of labour as embodied in commodities are varied, but one key reason is the tremendous influence of finance and banking over the value and quantity of money. At no moment has capitalism been free from the influence of finance, and at no moment has finance failed to produce fictitious capital – that is, freely circulating claims to future surplus value that act as money and so distort the ideal capitalist economy. The result is that, for this and other reasons, there is always more capital than value to which it has a claim, and this excess fictitious capital, while to a certain extent necessary to overcome certain crises in capitalist economics, fundamentally and essentially skews capital’s reckoning of value. As I have argued elsewhere (Haiven 2011), capital consistently mis-imagines value. Price is an essential but inherently flawed means of measuring underlying value.