Arbitrarily Large Bank Account

"I just threw away a brand-new top-of-the-line motorcycle in the middle of the street because I didn't feel like pushing it half a block to the garage. I am on an expense account that would blow your mind."

— Hiro Protagonist, Snow Crash

When someone is rich they tend to show it off and it's quite evident that money is no concern for them. This trope is for when a character is capable of financing any scheme at hand regardless of their apparent personal net worth. This is especially notable when a character is Affluent Ascetic or their money otherwise seemed to be a comfy inheritance and not the ownership of a Fiction 500 company.

Symptoms of this trope may include:

• Employees receiving blank checks
• Bribes being given in the form of priceless relics.
• Debit cards that allow you to withdraw unprintable amounts of money.
• The ability to buy large properties on a whim.
• Maintaining large facilities without any visible income.
• And/or rebuilding expensive bases that seem to get blown up all the time.

Unfortunate side effects may include:

• Sudden and unexplained bankruptcy for dramatic effect.
• Government spooks and/or tax auditors sniffing around when you withdraw unprintable amounts of money.
• The excessive purchase of useless tchotchkes.
• Starting insane DIY projects.
• And/or attempting to buy happiness.

Contrast Perpetual Poverty.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Men's Love, Daigo's father has his mooks give Kaoru a blank cheque, to be filled with any sum he likes so long as he ends his relationship with Daigo. He is apparently unaware that money can't buy you love.
• The Sohma family in Fruits Basket have absurd amounts of money. Exactly how the money is spread amongst the incredibly large family is never made certain, but most of the Sohmas are able to afford very good schools, expensive vacation outings, and repeatedly replacing walls that get destroyed during fights. It's justified given that a number of family members own highly successful businesses, and that it's implied that there's some family fortune.
• Mimori Unyuu, granddaughter of the founder of the Unyuu Group has this in Sket Dance. Her house alone cost literally more money than there is money.
• L from Death Note. He has enough money to have a skyscraper built in Tokyo, in a matter of months (and only use a few floors out of the 100 or so in there), pay for a pension for all members of the task force, and go to museums and concerts on a whim. He also leaves Near enough money that Near can quite literally throw money away to save the SPK building. It's revealed that he gets a lot of money for solving high-profile cases, and somehow has extensive knowledge of the stock market.
• The various members of the Black Book Club in YuYu Hakusho casually bet billions (though whether dollars or yen depends on the translation), with Tarukane's net worth being either equivalent to Japan's GDP or more money than exists on earth (66+ trillion yen or US dollars respectively).
• The Claremonts in The Case Files of Jeweler Richard all are immensely wealthy from generations of nobility and real estate in London. How much exactly is never made clear, but Richard drops five million yen without flinching.
• Kambe from The Millionaire Detective - Balance: UNLIMITED has, as you can guess from the title, literally infinite funds in his bank to spend as he sees fit.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Thanks to their connections with the Speedwagon Foundation, the Joestar family will often have nigh-unlimited funds, at least in terms of travel expenses. Stardust Crusaders has our heroes casually buy a luxury car (which they immediately give to a nearby farmer in exchange for some camels they can ride across the desert), and later a huge submarine.

Comic Books

• All-Star Superman: P.R.O.J.E.C.T.'s bank statement has an infinity symbol in the credit column.
• Batman: Bruce Wayne is rich enough that he can spend money like water on his superhero persona, donate millions to charity, and sometimes fund the entire Justice League while still maintaining a playboy lifestyle. He's also channeled millions (possibly billions) in technology from Wayne Enterprises, and still managed to hide the missing money in the margins.
• The Mueller organization of Clean Room has access to one of these due to its large number of adherents and its coercive control of them. In issue 12, it's represented to Chloe by a blue credit card with "essentially no limit".
• In The Courageous Princess, when Mabelrose escapes the dragon's lair, she steals a Bag of Holding and tosses a good chunk of the horde into it. As she makes her way home, she is rewarding people who feed her dinner or give her other assistance with huge fist-sized gems and piles of gold. When she is captured by the evil king Irgerat, he puts his entire treasure vault in the bag. When she escapes and gets the bag back, she barricades doors and buries entire rooms in gold to confound the guards pursuing her.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • Scrooge McDuck, being the richest man/duck in the world, seems to have however much money he needs at any time, with the exception of dramatic bankruptcy moments. He always gets it all back, of course. And yes, Scrooge has done plenty of the stuff on the list, especially insane DIY-projects, buying properties on a whim and giving blank checks (when he's not being a grouchy hoarder, as he usually is). Scrooge's fortune does sometimes get a specific value placed on it, but it's always so impossibly large than it might as well be written as "infinite". Some specific examples include:
    • One story that revolves around Scrooge's fortune being so large that it would actually be physically impossible for him to spend it all because he owns everything. Except cane factories.
    • Another story starts from the premise his fortune has surpassed half the money in the entire world.
    • One story has Scrooge dedicate himself to Asteroid Mining. Another member of the Billionaires' Club declares he'll do the same and outperform him... Only for a third member to point out that they may be billionaires, but Scrooge has far more money than the two of them combined, and it takes half a dozen "lesser" billionaires pooling their resources together to try and compete with Scrooge. Who still has a better spaceship thanks to still having far more money and having his ship built by Gyro.
    • In a number of Italian stories, Scrooge will use the incredibly powerful fuel called "dollarite", made from large amount of money. It barely dents his fortune.
    • Scrooge at times will call for help from the US Armed Forces, and they always answer... Because Scrooge taxes pay for most of their equipment.
    • The story The Treasury of Croesus has Scrooge claiming to be richer than Croesus, the richest man in history. At the end of the story, Magica creates the Midas' Touch charm using Croesus' first minted coin, knowing this way it'll be much more powerful than it would have been had she used Scrooge's #1 Dime... But the charm is completely useless, proving that Scrooge is richer than Croesus.
  • As the second and third richest ducks in the world respectively, Flintheart Glomgold and John Rockerduck have immense fortunes too - to the point in his debut story Glomgold had just as much money as Scrooge (with them immediately deciding to start a competition on strings because they couldn't tolerate to share the top spot), while Rockerduck has been shown to occasionally surpass Scrooge for brief periods.
    • In the above-mentioned asteroid mining story, Rockerduck was openly the only member of the Billionaire's Club who could have competed with Scrooge without help. He just decided not to bother because by the time he found out he also found out Gyro was building the ship and he knew his scientists couldn't compete without a headstart.
  • Whenever enraged enough at Scrooge, Brigitta McBridge will build a company capable of competing with Scrooge in whatever sector she's trying to beat him in, completely from thin air. The fact she usually can't be bothered to do so makes this even more impressive.
• The Exiles used to have a "Magic Credit Card" which would trick the credit network's computers into believing it was authorized for any transaction.
• Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted: Raymond Martin. He is the head of a construction company, but he has enough resources to hire an army of goons, to build and maintain a Humongous Mecha that can briefly go toe-to-toe with Kong (something which the multi-billion Apex Cybernetics corporation struggled to make a reality), and to bribe Monarch itself and multiple other relevant agencies into turning a blind eye so that he'll have free reign to rampage for 48 hours. One has to wonder if he really got all that money from his construction company, or if Walter Simmons somehow left his entire fortune to him.
• Tony Stark from Iron Man seems to have one of these. Most often seen when the battle to "save" a place demolishes it. Someone says "Iron Man will pay for it" and it's never heard about it again.
  Tony: How fast can we buy this building?
• Subverted in Nikolai Dante, during the "Gentleman Thief" storyline. Nikolai throws a party lasting several weeks that takes up an entire floor of Russia's most fancy and expensive resort believing he can simply pay for it out of the Romanovs' wealth. As it turns out, the Romanovs derive their wealth from taxes on the lands they control, and since Nikolai only governs Rudinshtein, the poorest fiefdom in the empire, he needs to get some more money fast.
• Richie Rich: Rich Enterprises.
• In Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool, Mr. Pilgrim, the mysterious president behind Star Key Enterprises, appears to have one of these. The employees are provided with a New York City apartment suite, a private jet, costumes uniforms, and anything else they need without any concern for expenses. Justified because the entire effort is run by a group of Cosmic Entities who can use magic to provide whatever funds are needed.
• Young Justice: Robin arranges for a Batmobile to be shipped across the country. His teammates are amazed at this expenditure (the car and managing to transport it secretly). Robin replies that he hid the costs in "the Batarang budget." If the Batarang budget by itself is (at minimum) six figures, Batman is a proper member of the Fiction 500.

Comic Strips

• The Phantom has two treasure chambers: one with gold and stuff he doesn't mind parting with, and one with priceless historical artefacts like Alexander the Great's diamond chalice and the snake Cleopatra committed suicide with.

Fan Works

• Code Prime: It's unclear where the Black Knights and Autobots get all their money considering none of them seem to have jobs but it's enough to fund their war against Britannian and later the Decepticons as well allow the civilians they rescue from Japan to live relatively comfortably aboard the Ark. Lelouch alludes to Rivalz about their rather complx budget plan but this conversation is quickly dropped.
• In Chapter 18 of Origin Story, entitled "Dragged Into the Harsh Light of Day", Alex and the members of Runaways are inspired to strike back at Norman Osborne in a way that would truly hurt him: by robbing him. They steal an OsCorp shipping container from the Port of Los Angeles bonded holding facility, thinking they'd net a few million dollars. When it turns out that the shipping container contains over $10 billion (its not specified how much over... just that its over) they all have a bit of a freak-out. Alex and Louise's share of the take is never specified at any point in the story, but after the robbery they've gone from being homeless to staying in a $7000 a night hotel suite, driving a brand new BMW, and dressing in designer clothing. They later buy a house in the Florida Keys and don't even blink at the $3.5 million sale price.
• Harry Potter in The Havoc Side of the Force ends up with over two trillion credits to his name (an amount he's told no bank can actually hold) due to not only robbing rich criminals blind, but bankrupting a planet's top mafia family by mind controlling The Don into buying massive amounts of goods from companies that Harry invests in beforehand. Harry ends up with so much money that crew members who earn less than one percent of the profits (going by official charters Harry looked up) still end up millionaires after a single job.
• Harry again in I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. In this story, several things he brought with him from Earth turned out to be immensely valuable in a galaxy far, far away. If his comments are right, Harry wouldn't have to worry about running low on funds unless he started buy planets.
• A number of Harry Potter stories give the titular character ridiculous amounts of money, such as hundreds of millions of galleons (amounting to billions of British pounds). Even ones that don't specify an amount will include a line about how his grandchildren's grandchildren would never have to work.
• I am [REDACTED]: Thanks to Izuku being the undisputed Number One hero in the world, the Midoriyas have more money than they could ever dream of, to the point that Hisashi and Inko have quit their jobs, with the former moving permanently back to Japan with his family. This makes their bakery less a business venture and more a hobby, so they donate most of the proceeds they get from it to charity instead.
• Kallen Stadtfeld, Countess of Britannia: By the time canon starts, Kallen has enough money to "buy the entirety of Shinjuku and laugh off the expense". When her brother is reluctant to come to her party, he's informed that Kallen and Lelouch could each buy him a luxury private jet for his birthday and laugh about getting him duplicate gifts.
• Little Glimpses: Rainbow Dash is a princess and has (limited) access to the royal treasury as a result. It took Fluttershy's middle-class family six months to scrape together enough money to stay at a hotel in Canterlot for just a few days to visit her. When Rainbow hears how much it cost, she waves her hoof and both pays for the expenses and extends their stay for as long as they want with what is basically her alowance.
• The protagonist of With This Ring uses his power ring to mine asteroids for gold and platinum as needed. He's only processed a couple of them, because he doesn't want to disrupt the economy too much, and his ring can directly manufacture just about anything he wants. Still, whenever a problem can be solved by throwing money at it, it's a non-issue for him.
  Paul: Um, it depends how you count it. I've got about five million dollars in cash, but in addition to that I'm the only person currently mining this star system's asteroid belts. If I fully realised that asset... (Ring? Oh.) Which I couldn't because that much money doesn't exist. Um... About five times richer than the Earth.
• Harry and the Shipgirls sees an Omake where Harry Potter buys the country of Liechtenstein just so Tamamo-no-Mae can be queen of a country for two weeks, just for an anniversary gift.
  Tamamo: "... On the one hand, I have always wanted to be a ruler. On the other... renting rulership takes some of the fun out of it..."
• Distance Learning for Fun and Profit...: Due to how revolutionary and (relatively) affordable her inventions are, Taylor's think tank has a budget such that it's stated multiple times "price is literally no object". One omake states her budget is the entirety of the USA's GDP.

Films — Animated

• In Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Mr. Whitmore alone funds the entire Atlantis exploration mission, including a full crew of "the best of the best" and a ton of hi-tech submarines and drilling equipment. All to fulfill a promise made to Milo's grandfather!

Films — Live-Action

• In Batman & Robin, when Poison Ivy enthralls a charity auction, including Batman and Robin, they begin bidding in millions of dollars against each other, for Robin to snidely offer that he wears a utility belt, not a money belt, only for Batman to produce his Bat Credit Card, with an expiry date of Forever, shutting Robin up immediately, who, admittedly, was planning to borrow his bid off Batman.
• Saito in Inception has one, justified given that he's head of the #2 energy conglomerate on Earth. When faced with the challenge of infiltrating a jetliner, he uses the expediting power of cash:
  Arthur: But you'd have to buy out the entire cabin. And the first class flight crew.
  Saito: I bought the airline.
  [Everybody turns and stares at him. Saito looks uncomfortable under the stares.]
  Saito: It seemed neater.
• Star Wars:
  • Played straight with The Empire. Can you imagine exactly how much it would cost to build not one but two moon-sized, hyperspace capable battle stations? Plus there's the 25,000 1.6 km long imperial star destroyers or the equipment of an unknown number of millions if not billions of stormtroopers. And those are just the most iconic parts of the imperial military.
  • In Attack of the Clones, the Jedi are more perplexed that they did not sense the creation of the Clone Army through the Force, when the real question should have been how one Jedi Master (Sifo-Dyas) was supposedly able to just order up an entire clone army and a fleet of warships and weapons to go with them, without anybody noticing the movement of the huge amount of money doing so would require or questioning where a single Jedi Master would get it.
  • In The Force Awakens, the First Order, who are The Remnant of The Empire, manage to build a massive solar system-destroying weapon built into a planet (which itself is capable of traveling through hyperspace), that eats stars and fires all the energy in one shot through hyperspace to obliterate entire solar systems at a distance before they even know anything is coming. How they got the budget or resources to build this thing is anyone's guess.^note If it's based on real life? Grifting the hardcore Empire fanatics and terrorizing the planets under their control with threats of total obliteration.
  • In The Last Jedi, the Order somehow builds a flagship much larger than Vader's, then spectacularly loses it to a suicide attack by a much smaller Rebellion ship.
  • In The Rise of Skywalker the returned Palpatine managed to somehow fund an entire Final Order organization which built a fleet of Star Destroyers with miniature planet-killing superlasers.
• Parodied in Small Soldiers: during the aftermath of the toys' rampage, Bill Mars keeps everyone quiet by having his secretary go around printing checks with unspecified amounts of money.
  Stuart: Not even you have enough money to make up for all this...[gets check]...OK...I guess you do...
• In Synecdoche, New York, Caden Cotard wins the MacArthur genius grant, giving him the funds to construct a to-scale and fully detailed theatre set of the entirety of New York ... including the warehouse containing the set.
• The Disaster Artist, which portrays the making of the infamous Cult Classic film The Room (2003), shows that Tommy Wiseau was able to pull large sums of money from seemingly nowhere. That is, enough to afford two apartments (in San Francisco and Los Angeles), and fund the $6 million filming of The Room. He never reveals where this money comes from.
• Bicentennial Man: Andrew's affluence is again used to avoid creating specific prices for anything, with him too rich to worry about the cost. In this film, it is especially used when the NorthAm CEO is trying to rivet (correction; screw) Andrew over the price. He calculates a cost more than he makes in a year, which Andrew shrugs off as merely one month's income.

Literature

• Crassus essentially fills this role of Julius Caesar in Conn Iggulden's Emperor novels, funding Caesar's legion and a good chunk of his consul campaign. Justified in that Crassus is the richest man in Rome, and is shown to be extremely careful with money.
• This drives a good deal of the plot in The Count of Monte Cristo. Edmond Dantes uses his enormous treasure horde to ludicrous purposes, including buying his own bank, thereby forcing his enemy Danglars to extend him essentially unlimited credit, and, with false stock tips via a bribed telegraph operator and careful instructions to certain allies, ultimately ruined him.
• Of the four men hunting Dracula, one is a wealthy rancher, one is a young nobleman, and a third unexpectedly inherits a fortune over the course of the novel. Concerns about expenses never come up during the course of the chase.
• The Dark Hunters are subject to this. Being paid in literally mountains of gold and jewels.
• Flinx of the Humanx Commonwealth universe has this perk after he assists the Ulru-Ujurrians in Orphan Star. After he gives them the gift of civilization, the innocent, yet exponentially intelligent aliens reward Flinx by building him a Cool Starship and pulling some trickery with Commonwealth banking records to give him effectively unlimited wealth. Being decidedly unostentatious by nature, he uses the cash mainly to bribe inconvenient authorities.
• Ender Wiggin by the time of Speaker for the Dead. A combination of a generous military pension, a superintelligent AI controlling his investments, and three thousand years of accumulated earnings have made his wealth effectively unlimited. When he needs to get somewhere without shuttle service, he buys a cargo ship for 90 billion dollars (which is apparently "not even a drop in the bucket"), and gives away the cargo. It's noteworthy that he leads a very simple life due to the PTSD he developed from earning that wealth (through unwillingly committing mass genocide), and only cares how much money he has when he needs it to accomplish his mission.
• The Twilight Saga:
  • The Cullen family takes this to ridiculous levels, owing to Alice using her ability to predict the future to play the stock market successfully. Over the course of the series, they purchase a vast number of extremely expensive cars, a large house, an x-ray machine, and an island.
  • In the outtakes for Twilight, Bella, Edward and Alice spend huge amounts in Las Vegas on the trip back from Arizona.
  • In the New Moon outtakes, Edward keeps sending Bella large amounts of money (which she refuses to accept) while he is supposed to be gone.
• In The Merchant of Venice, Portia has an inheritance like this. While the rest of the cast is falling over themselves trying to pay back Antonio's bond to Shylock, when Bassanio tells Portia about the bond, her reaction is "Six thousand ducats? Is that all? Here, give Antonio the money. No, have twice as much. You know what? Just to be on the safe side, let's triple it."
• In Robert Asprin's Phule's Company series, the main character hands someone a credit card, and it is noted that that particular 'level' (gold, silver, platinum, etc) of credit card is usually used for the purchase of entire corporations.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's New Watch, Anton finds out that his Watch-issued ATM card doesn't appear to have a limit (or rather, the ATM doesn't report the limit, as the card was issued by a foreign bank). When he confronts Geser about it, Geser calmly explains that, being able to predict stock market trends and currency exchange rates means that the Watch is never short on money. Apparently, all Watch employees can take out as much money as they want, but it's not in the nature of the Light Others to be greedy. When Geser asks Anton if Anton would like to get himself a Bentley, Anton just says that his car works just fine. Besides, an expensive car would just invite curses from everyone around him. Anton does say that he wants to take his wife and daughter to a tropical vacation. Geser just shrugs indifferently.
  • Interestingly, in Day Watch, Anton grimly notes how a Dark Other is able to fly first class while Anton can only afford to fly economy and muses that the Day Watch can get plenty of money using dishonest means while the Night Watch is limited by its honesty. Then again, what's so dishonest about being able to predict the future with great accuracy and using it to get funds for the Light? After all, there's nothing illegal about being good at predicting.
• In The Dresden Files, the Raiths are a Fiction 500 whose assets include the entire pornography industry. At one point, Harry asks Thomas Raith to give Molly a Raith family emergency charge card:
  Thomas: ...Once they ring up the first charge on the card, it'll be good for twenty-four hours.
  Molly: What's the limit?
  Thomas: ...Twenty-four hours.
• Early in the Left Behind series, fully appointed Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia inherits the resources of a multibillionaire he personally killed, thereby acquiring the money to get up to all the villainy he wants. He subsequently issues his inner circle (like Designated Hero Buck Williams) unlimited-funds expense accounts. Global tyranny is useful like that.
• In E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, Unattached (Gray) Lensmen turn over their bank accounts to the Patrol, and receive in return a book of 100 checks, "any one of those slips would be honored without hesitation or question for any amount of cash money she pleased to draw; for any object or thing she chose to buy. Anything - absolutely anything - from a pair of half-credit stockings up to and beyond a hundred-million credit space-ship. ANYTHING!".
  • And when that book runs out you can just get another one for the asking.
  • Given the immense capabilities of any Patrol spaceship, either a hundred million credits is absurdly cheap or the half-credit stockings are absurdly expensive...
• In Margin Play, by Eric Plume, Amber insists on a large expense account as part of the contract with Hayes. He gives her a credit card in the name of the Davis-Caillion Corporation. When she asks what the credit limit on it is, he rather smugly informs her that she "couldn't max it out if she tried."
• Greg Mandel Trilogy:
  • In Mindstar Rising, trillionaire heiress Julia Evans gets the bank records of someone who's plotting against her company by buying the entire bank. She points out that it's actually a good investment.
  • In The Nano Flower, Julia Evans gives Greg Mandel access to a sixty-five million pound expense account while he's investigating whether Evan's missing husband has discovered alien life, given the vast economic implications of First Contact. Mandel reflects that if his mercenary partner Suzi got her hands on that money, even though they are Fire-Forged Friends it would be a goodbye that would last beyond the end of the world.
• Deconstructed in Scott Meyer's Off to Be the Wizard. Most hackers who discover the existence of the reality-altering file figure out they can edit their bank account balance pretty quickly. Naturally, they immediately go on a spending spree, adding to their account when necessary. Then the US Treasury comes knocking. Whoops. It turns out that it's really strange when a bank account grows without any deposits or transfers on record. The fact that these people tend to be hackers doesn't help their case, since the agents just assume they're hacking their banks. It could also qualify as counterfeit, since that money comes from nowhere. As a rule, the hackers end up performing a Time Travel Escape using the file, most male Anglophones usually ending up in Medieval England, posing as wizards.
• In Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat is so rich he has no idea how much money he has. He leaves it up to his account managers to properly invest and increase his fortune. Since he's a vampire, he rarely needs money. The one time he needs a sizable amount, he simply calls him one of the accountants to wire the sum ($20 million) to him. He knows that, for him, $20 million is pocket change. There are other vampires who are incredibly wealthy, with the wealth usually accumulated by killing people and stealing from them throughout history. Armand, for example, owns an island and several private jets. The island is a popular tourist destination, which means his fortune keeps growing. Maharet is one of the oldest vampires in existence (about 4000 years old) and spends her time watching over the numerous matrilineal descendants of her human daughter. She uses her enormous fortune to help the poor families as a benevolent matriarch.
• Bobby Hanes from The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn seems to have this as a result of his wealthy upbringing combined with his own personal business savvy. Among the things he does:
  • He buys a bus company at the beginning of the novel after they fail to run their busses on time.
  • He buys the Los Angeles Dodgers from a West German conglomerate.
  • He temporarily marries a movie starlet and takes her on a months-long honeymoon around the world.
  • He buys out the apartment complex in Brooklyn that replaced the Dodgers' old ballpark, as well as part of the surrounding neighborhood, moves the residents to temporary housing, then moves them into a newly-built (and nicer) apartment complex.
  • He then tears down the apartment complex, rebuilds the ballpark, and moves the Dodgers all the way back to Brooklyn.
• Ford Prefect's company credit card in Mostly Harmless. At one point, Arthur asks him how much the amount he's just charged to it is worth in Earth terms, and gets the reply "Switzerland". The catch is, it only works if he's actually filed a story.
• Isaac Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man": The Martin family is already rich, but when they start selling Andrew's creations, he becomes incredibly rich. He is taking orders years in advance and doesn't have to worry about the cost of anything. This is used as a way to avoid setting specific prices on anything.
• Bigend Books: Cayce Pollard receives a pretty much blank check to explore the nature of the mysterious videos. Her employer warns her that he'd like to be forewarned if she intends to buy something expensive, like an aeroplane or a company or significant amounts of real estate. Not that he won't let her, but he just wants a little heads-up.
• Deconstructed in Starter Villain (2023): Uncle Jake was technically a trillionaire supervillain on paper thanks to running Protection Rackets on global superpowers, but it was almost all in the form of non-tangible assets that he couldn't actually use. It's explained that money isn't real when you're dealing with the people who run the mints — it's about building leverage and denying assets to his rivals, not about going on spending sprees.

Live-Action TV

• In Torchwood, it seems that Torchwood has an unlimited bank account, and it is mentioned several times through the series how each of the members have had a significant pay increase over their old jobs. It seems that they all have rather nice places, and large amounts of spare cash since starting with Torchwood.
  Gwen: We get our pay cheques straight from The Crown, when I got my first I couldn't believe it - I had to hide the extra money from my boyfriend.
• The Doctor gives unlimited credit to a companion in the Doctor Who episode "The Long Game". He's told to keep out of trouble. Yeah, right.
  • The Expanded Universe implies that the Doctor is insanely wealthy thanks to compound interest, and that he has to make intentionally bad investments just to burn off some of the money.
• Both averted and played straight in Sanctuary. When the newbie to the team asks if there is a health plan, and Amanda Tapping's character says no. (Granted, the organisation is headed by probably the best doctor in the world with medical contacts in every corner of the globe, so it's entirely possible their health plan is simply "Dr Helen Magnus". Also, the Sanctuary has enough resources to purchase a lot of new medical equipment, and pay the taxes and upkeep costs for a castle. Given that they always get help for any injuries or illnesses that occur, possibly they don't have a designed health plan because they'd have to write "Covers anything. Like, anything at all that could or could not happen to anyone, human or otherwise."
  • This is a critical component of the season 4 episode "Untouchables", when the United Nations Security Council attache tries to blackmail Helen into stepping down from her position and turning the Sanctuary over to UN control by threatening to cut off her funds. She promptly tells him to take a flying leap, then reveals that she has money "hidden in places [the attache] doesn't even know exist" and that she manipulated him into cutting them off for good so the Sanctuary could do its job independent of any kind of bureaucratic oversight. Whew!
• The Addams Family:
  • No matter what zany, impossible, or downright idiotic scheme Gomez invests in, he always comes out willing to invest in the next ridiculous idea. Whether or not he actually makes money from these investments is questionable. The Addamses are rich/crazy enough that one year they decided to go to the moon for their family vacation.
  • In one Halloween episode, the Addams are shown to be wealthy enough that Gomez keeps a drawer full of banknotes in the living room and he doesn't think twice about giving away handfuls of cash with a smile on his face.
  • In The Movie, there's a fleeting glimpse of just how much wealth they have. Gordon accidentally activates a rotating section of the vault to reveal a Scrooge McDuck-caliber money pit, about as wide as an Olympic swimming pool, several swimming pools long, and who knows how deep. And it's most likely filled with gold doubloons, as evidenced by Gomez paying Tully's expenses by shovelling them into his briefcase. For comparison, all the gold ever mined throughout human history in real life wouldn't quite fill a single Olympic swimming pool. Also, consider the construction cost of the vault plus the subterranean canal leading up to it plus the slide system leading down to the canal.
• Whether it was intentional or not, Mulder of The X-Files comes off this way. It's implied that he comes from a wealthy family, though never explicity said so. He grew up on Martha's Vineyard, his parents owned a summer house in Rhode Island, he went to Oxford for college, and "rents" a Congressman for his own purposes. Through the series, he's able to do things that are just not feasible on an FBI agent's salary—like travel to Antarctica and rent a Snow Cat. He is also nonplussed every time he is fired from the bureau, saying he would simply continue his work in the paranormal without their help. He is also able to go into hiding during the final season, and concern for money is never shown.
• Charlie Crews on Life received a settlement of undisclosed size due to his wrongful imprisonment. In addition to the standard Big Fancy House and Cool Cars, he uses it to buy things like orange groves (on a whim) and solar farms (after having a dream about it). Ted Earley, Charlie's housemate and money manager, occasionally mentions that he's been growing Charlie's wealth so all the large whimsical purchases are barely making a dent on the principal.
• Mr. Finch on Person of Interest. Nobody knows precisely how rich he is beyond his billionaire status being known, but it does appear that he has a whopping great amount of money at his disposal. He is known to gain access into buildings by buying the entire building. We know that he has a number of companies still running a profit (and several episodes have him cleaning up an Esoteric Happy Ending by buying a dirty company for cheap and putting intelligent people in charge), but he still winces when he has to give Leon a million dollars to gamble at a casino. He knows he's never getting a penny of that back.
  • Finch also has arbitrarily large stashes of cash; which lets him pull out a Briefcase Full of Money when he needs to get Reese emergency surgery off the books.
• Done, more or less, in Mad Men, albeit probably unintentionally. We actually know how much Don Draper makes at the beginning of the series ($30,000; that much in 1960 dollars is worth a little under $250,000 in today's money). We don't know his later income (which includes a junior partnership stake in Sterling Cooper—which gave him a lot of money—and later a senior partnership stake in SCDP—which made losses in 1964 but which began to turn a profit in 1965-66), and most importantly for this trope, we also don't know how much he has in assets. All we know about how much money Don has is this: he can throw money at any problem (sometimes this is a problem); he can write a check for a Jaguar E-type without on a whim; and, most impressively, he was able to loan $25,000 to Pete Campbell when the bank demands more collateral, and would've been willing to loan $50,000 to Lane if he'd known about Lane's money problems. Since Don also put up $50,000, had Lane not been too proud to ask for the money, Don has shown that he has enough money that he is willing to bankroll SCDP to the tune of $125,000—nearly a million in today's dollars—almost without thinking.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Mr. Banker in the "Pantomime Horses" sketch has a graph that reads "How Rich I Am." The bar goes up off the graph.
• Richard Castle on Castle is known to be wealthy (he's an author with over 20 New York Times Best-Sellers, so yeah), but its often implied in the show that not only is he wealthy, he's very wealthy. Wealthy enough that he really doesn't have to worry about ever over-spending, regardless of what he's buying. There are a few instances where his limits are implied, though.
  Castle: I put my money in banks. These people own banks.
  • He's also never seen buying anything that isn't within range of a wealthy lottery winner; he considers his connections much more advantageous. While he does own a Ferrari, as he himself says, "It goes the same speed as every other car in rush hour traffic."
• The Mick: Chip (age twelve) carries a thousand dollars in cash on him and is able to lend Mick forty-two hundred dollars to pay off a loan shark, and even Ben (age eight) has a black card.
• Established in the first episode of Leverage, where by taking down the aeronautics company and CEO who both hired them to steal a competitor's design (which he lied about to begin with) then tried to kill them to hide his theft (and Hardison using creative accounting with stock trades, and then doubling that with international stock markets), the entire team now had more money then any single heist ever, called "this is retirement money, this is buy an island and retire money". This was then used to allow them to buy any equipment they needed from thereon, and allow them to do good to help people and not for the money that often went (back) to the victim (though Parker still has trouble sometimes letting go of physical money/jewels/expensive items).
  • While not unlimited - The Freeze-Frame Bonus is that each check Hardison gave the team was $32,761,349.05, making the total haul $163,806,745.25 - it's well beyond what any member was making before by themselves. And since they keep working together, it's presumed that Hardison continues to handle their finances, keeping them all well above worrying about needing any of what they steal back.
• Frank Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a truly bizarre example — while he's amassed a non-specific fortune via decades of scams and shady business practices, he chooses to live a disgusting lifestyle in abject poverty because he hated the upper-class life he had to live with his ex-wife who repeatedly cheated on him. He still runs the occasional scam, apparently for the fun of it, and occasionally breaks out his checkbook to buy his way out of trouble, but he shares a bed with Charlie in a rat-infested apartment, eating raccoon meat and peeing in a bucket.
• In Time Trax, Darien never has to worry about money. Then again, he's never extravagant, as his job is to stay low-key and track down temporal fugitives. The reason money is no issue is because his credit card is actually an advanced AI called SELMA that can hack any 20th century device, so every time he swipes it, it simply hacks into the system and marks the purchase as "paid". Presumably, if he needs cash, she can simply do the same thing to an ATM.
• Memories of the Alhambra: CEO Jin-woo buys the Bonita Hostel in Granada and the rights to Se-ju's game for 10 billion Korean won, with Se-ju's sister Hee-ju signing the deal, and she uses the money to buy her family a new home in a Seoul suburb and to start a new guitar-crafting workshop.
• Daredevil (2015): In season 1, the amount of money Wilson Fisk makes from his organized criminal ventures is never disclosed. It's enough for him to live in a multimillion dollar penthouse in Chelsea, and be able to pay off countless cops and politicians to do his dirty work. After he's arrested, most of his assets are frozen and seized by the federal government, and in season 2, while he's locked up, he nearly bankrupts himself using his rainy day funds to pay off three inmates on the inside into becoming his muscle on the inside. He takes over the prison after tricking Frank Castle into killing Dutton, the prison kingpin, and assumes control of Dutton's contraband ring. It's never said how much money the ring makes, but it's enough for Fisk to have complete control over the guards and inmates, and, just before the start of season 3, enough for him to buy the Presidential Hotel under the table through a series of shell companies.
• Parks and Recreation:
  • Ron Swanson turns out to be Secretly Wealthy, with a large amount of gold stashed to trade in for cash whenever he needs it. While no specific amount is given, according to his attorney in the episode "Gin It Up", the 5% he plans to leave to his step-daughters and biological son is considered a substantial inheritance that will keep them decently comfortable if something tragic were to unexpectedly happen.
  • Donna Meagle comes from a wealthy family and has enough disposable income to drop tens of thousands of dollars on shares at the Snakehole Lounge, owns a luxury car, and is paying for a mortgage on a condo in Seattle. However, it is played around with a bit, as part of the reason she likes living in Pawnee is that it allows her to live comfortably on a smaller budget while still taking care of her other expenses, and in Season 6, she earns her real estate license, just after Pawnee absorbs Eagleton but prior to the property boom which occurs during the time skip, even being drafted to broker Gryzzl's attempts to purchase a parcel of land which eventually sell for $125 million dollars.

Professional Wrestling

• In a real life example, Ted Turner was such a huge fan of wrestling, he essentially handed WCW a blank check, and vowed to keep it alive as long as he was able. Unfortunately, not having anybody to report to left WCW grossly mismanaged. Several WCW vets remembered getting empty boxes Fed-Exed to their homes, and being mailed checks made out for $0.00. They also had dozens of people on the payroll that never did anything (and many of whom they forgot were under contract.) Of course, this hemorrhaging of money is what led WCW to crash and burn in 2001.

Video Games

• Early in Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), Larry wins the lottery, meaning he'll get one million dollars per year for the rest of his life. He initially receives a one million dollar bill. It's useless until you can get it broken down into bill form, but after that you have effectively infinite money. Of course, by the end of the game, you'll have spent most of it on junk, lost the remainder, and the lottery went bankrupt.
• Auric Goldfinger, in GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. GoldenEye actually gets to take advantage of this in the Underwater Base, when he buys a minisub as part of his escape route. Despite his extreme wealth, Goldfinger admonishes his pawn: "Stop spending my money!"
• In the Idle Game AdVenture Capitalist, you eventually earn ridiculous amounts of money and learn about new terms like "novemvigintillion."
• James Telestrian III in Shadowrun Returns Dead Man's Switch campaign. If the Player Character asks for hard cash as a reward for aiding him, he turns to his butler and asks him to just hand the player enough that he won't have to spend time haggling with you and walks off, leaving the player with a neat 100,000 nuyen, more money than you've earned throughout the campaign until this point combined.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, you can encounter a character named No Bark Noonan, the man lives alone in a overly booby trapped shack ranting about insane conspiracies involving "mole rat people" and "commie ghosts that don't know their dead" who is clearly just a jobless hobo right? Well a quick game of cards with him will reveal that this guy is Loaded. He is capable of betting 1000 caps in a casual game of cards on a whim and is more than capable of playing again and again no matter how much you win from him. To put that in context, that is about as much as Dennis Crocker will bet, Dennis Crocker being the NCR's ambassador and the NCR being the largest known functional state in the world at this point.
• Shun Akiyama from Yakuza 4 is filthy rich, rich enough to throw tens of millions of yen at people without the expectation of getting the money back (he also charges no interest), and still have plenty of money left over to throw at more people. His actual wealth is revealed near the end of the game to be in the range of 100 billion yen, almost 937 million USD.
• Actually discussed in EarthBound (1994). The Minches, the neighbors of Ness and his family, have apparently loaned them Eleventy Zillion dollars (the English translation instead says "a hundred thousand dollars or more"), and these immense funds are drip-fed to Ness's bank account to finance his quest to stop Giygas; the family otherwise lives fairly humbly, judging by their home in Onett. How his father knows what monsters Ness has defeated to send an equivalent amount of money is never explained.
• The Room: The Game: You start the game with 6 million dollars, so money will never be an actual issue during gameplay. This happens to be a Mythology Gag, as was is the budget for the movie the game is based on.

Webcomics

• Petey the Fleetmind from Schlock Mercenary has a team of accountants whose job it is to count the accountants who keep track of his accountants.
  • Massey Reinstein, representing another similarly wealthy client, figuratively wrote a blank check to Sanctum Adroit and recommended against putting too large a sum on it, on the grounds that that it would require a major military power to protect that level of wealth, rather than any burden on his client's finances.
  Massey: Slap some numbers on it and let's sign.
  Menendez: You haven't seen the numbers.
  Massey: I know what numbers look like.
  Menendez: ... How much money do you actually have?
  Massey: I know what all the numbers look like.
  • Then there was that one job the Toughs did for the UNS...
  Your budget is, and I quote General Bala-Amin here, "all the money".
• The Whiteboard: When asked how exactly Doc pays for the frequent shop rebuildings and massive amounts of damage done by his projects, the only answer he's ever given is "DARPA". Later he's shown to have several roomfuls of money. However, if this non-canon filler◊ is to be believed, those are 1-dollar bills.
• Biter Comics: A new employee at a company is given an unlimited expense account. He quickly puts it to use, buying the company.
• Res Nullius: The main characters have, through tragic inheritance, the entire liquid assets of two extinct multi-planetary civilizations. Since the empires that drove said civilizations to extinction want their spoils of conquest, they can't really flaunt it.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation averts this and plays it straight. It's heavily implied they have a steady stream of cash thanks to several SCPs (and thus, can build things like moon bases or secret military-grade bases), but wasting resources is frowned upon, and the Foundation tries to be as utilitarian and cheap as possible when dealing with containment in the name of not wasting cash. Several doctors have been reprimanded for wasting said money. Maybe even demoted to D-Class.
  • Class D Personnel (D for disposable) used to play this trope straight, with dozens of D-Class being used for dangerous experiments. However, in recent years, Wiki Admins have discouraged the unfettered use of D-Class in experiments, since there are only so many death row inmates in the world from which to recruit D-Class.
• KaibaCorp is this trope played straight in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. Seto Kaiba has no trouble at all supplying himself with helicopters, planes that look like dragons, underground computer systems, and at one point he just buys his own Duel Monsters tournament. Why does he do all that? Because he's "obscenely rich". No wonder he's the Trope Namer for Screw the Rules, I Have Money!.
• Hardestadt Delac from Girls on Film is wealthy enough to own two houses, a vintage car, has access to dozens of resources, and he still somehow manages to have enough money to give his partner, Erin, a very large salary.
• Played straight in the Brave New World Universe with The Benefactor, who always seems to have money to build his armies of death robots, and pay to have them shipped across the country. At least one of his secret manufaturing plants has been destroyed, only to have Arachnya, Seeker, and Guardian find that there are plenty more where it came from.
  • The Joker^noteNo, not THAT Joker also seems to have unlimited funds to pay his goons whatever exorbitant paycheck they have to keep them working for a lunatic. When it is revealed that he is behind HARP's massive military operation in Pine Ridge, one has to wonder where his money is coming from. Also, how he got ahold of military grade weapons and equipment.
• An aversion shows up in Noob. Gaea is an obvious case of The Scrooge and her way of pulling I Am Not Left-Handed is not hesitating to use the expensive and powerful items she owns if it's the only way for her to win a fight. However, in Season 5 by which she has been hoarding in-game currency for four years, she mentions that she's "saving up" to Ivy. Ivy's reply can be praphrased as "What are saving up for ? You should be able to afford anything you want by now." It happens that Gaea needs to pay a debt owed by her Instant Fan Club at the time, but the point about Gaea's wealth is still valid.
• In the Ask Serious Rainbow blog, missions from the Serious Foundation, for someone at Serious Rainbow's level, pay out one quadrillion dollars. She singlehandedly funded the crossover blog The Dashpad's house, and all the repairs it inevitably gets, and one time at another crossover blog brought $400,000 in cash to cover any damages any other Rainbow Dash causes.

Western Animation

• The Zeta Project had Zeta's unlimited credit card, which creates as much money as he needs at the time. Ro takes full advantage of this, then immediately tells Zeta to not tell anyone else because people might abuse it.
• Kim Possible:
  • Usually when Dr. Drakken meets Kim, it ends with his lair being destroyed, but he never has any trouble having it repaired or using another. In the episode "Ron Millionaire" he bemoans his money trouble, just as Kim's sidekick Ron receives an implausibly large royalty check.
  • In "Ron Millionaire", Ron treats his windfall as a an ALBL, even though there's a fixed amount on that check.
  • Señor Senior Senior is so rich that he was able to convert his mansion into a supervillain lair, complete with Spinny Tops of Doom and other requisite implements of destruction, on a whim. Not that it needed a lot of refurbishing to begin with, as Ron Stoppable was so eager to point out how much the mansion was already like a lair, and even gave SSS the idea of becoming a villain.
• No mention is ever made of how Phineas and Ferb can pay for their insanely ambitious projects; presumably, they can find a fix for that just as easily as they can build a ski resort in the backyard. Possibly justified since several of their projects are actually insanely profitable, if short-lived, business ventures. Dan Povenmire has stated that they took the profits from the roller coaster they built in the first episode and invested it wisely. Doofenshmirtz never seems short of funds for his evil plans either; it's mentioned he gets alimony from his ex-wife and presumably his corporation makes money for him too.
• Fry on Futurama discovers he has one of these at one point due to the power of a thousand years of compound interest. Of course, he spends it all on near-extinct ''anchovies'' by the end of the episode. It's unlikely that the interest would have kept pace with inflation. Ignoring that, Fry's bank account is large, but it's clearly not enough to be on par with, say, Mom's.
• This seems to be the case for just about any character or organization in Totally Spies!. Even highschool students have no problem building large robots or a whole replica of the school enclosed in a force field. In comparison, the girls' ability to do insane amounts of shopping on a daily basis seems quite reasonable.
• Augustus Saint Cloud of The Venture Bros. possesses "an inordinate amount of money." While he is technically a supervillain, he mostly uses it to buy props from movies. And the occasional island. And all without giving a second thought about the price tag.
  • The Monarch is noted to fund his villainy with a trust fund inherited from his father (the billionaire playboy and vigilante Blue Morpho). As this includes a small army of henchmen^note Henchmen are seen to come cheap, mainly supplied by being people who are suicidal, homeless, desolate, and/or easily manipulated (or in some cases, such as 21's, kidnapped). That however doesn't take into account food and clothing for, at his height, hundreds of henchmen., a flying car, an armored wingsuit with built-in arm-mounted dart launchers, a gigantic floating cocoon fortress, and all kinds of crazy gadgets, it was evidently a very large one. The series later subverts this, revealing he actually overdrew from his inheritance, leaving he, his wife and 21 homeless and in debt.
  21: So how's the brilliant Blue Morpho plan to do all that?
  The Monarch: The same way I do everything else amazing—by blowing my inheritance.
• In the 2 Stupid Dogs episode "A Quarter," the dogs attend a money-making seminar (all part of a ridiculous method of obtaining a quarter to make a phone call) conducted by an über-wealthy grinning figure named Buck Biggs, who has written two books—"Give Me Money" and "Give Me More Money."
• In Dexter's Laboratory, the titular character seems to have no problem acquiring what is ostensibly millions of dollars in scientific equipment, and his parents are none the wiser. Though there is one early episode where Dexter struggles to pay off a massive debt to NASA.
• In Hazbin Hotel, the titular hotel doesn't take any pay from its guests, being more of a charity venture. It's able to operate because its owner, Charlie Morningstar, is Princess of Hell, and can easily afford things like repairing the hotel whenever whenever it's damaged (though she complains about how tedious it is) or bribing random sinners with stacks of cash. One might ask where her money comes from, since her father is entirely apathetic and probably doesn't collect taxes, but it's possible she just conjures it wholesale.
• In Steven Universe, Marty gives Greg a check for ten-million dollars brought on by the success of a song Greg wrote rewritten as a burger jingle. While he still decides to work at the carwash, he is now filthy rich, being able to afford an absurdly expensive hotel suite in Empire City, a brand-new touch-pad, a vintage car and a telescope good enough to see the Moon Base and the Barn on the surface of the moon.
• BoJack Horseman: While Bojack has many problems, finances have never been one of them. It's never been revealed how much money BoJack has, but he made enough from his Horsin' Around royalties that he could live in a gated, mountaintop mansion for almost two decades with any need to work and he could also impulse buy restaurants and yachts without it straining his bank account.
  • After starring in Secretariat and restarting his acting career, he donated his Horsin' Around royalties to charity with no obvious effect on his income.
  • After entering celebrity rehab, he reacted to the $100,000 entrance fee with all the annoyance of someone being told their fast food order is 50 cents higher than what they originally thought. He then proceeds to reenter rehab an additional five times and would have stayed longer indefinitely if he had his way.
  • This finally comes to a head in the latter half of season 6: after the truth comes out about his involvement in Sarah Lynn's death her parents sue him for five million dollars, which he's extremely unhappy about but can still afford... but then the Xerox corporation sues him for one hundred million dollars, which is far more then he can afford and not only wipes out his savings but forces him to sell his house and all his remaining rights towards Horsin' Around.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle: At the end of part 1 of "Bullwinkle's Testimonial Dinner," Bullwinkle shells out money for plane tickets to China (to retrieve a shirt he sent to be cleaned at a Chinese laundry—in China) and muses how he and Rocky gets all the money to galavant around the world.

Real Life

• It was an embarrassment for the NFL when a study showed upwards of 40 percent of multi-millionaire players go bankrupt within 5 years after retiring. They did not know how to manage their money and just assumed it was more money than they could spend. It's particularly unfortunate given that sports leagues want to recruit successful high school and college students, which is a hard sell when those students buy into the stereotype that professional athletes are stupid meatheads who don't know how to do anything else.
• William Randolph Hearst was a media mogul in the first half of the 20th century whose fortune was almost impossible to calculate; he was the unofficial model that Citizen Kane was based on. Even the most wealthy men of the modern world would only amount to a fraction of what he had. He owned enough land by himself that he could almost qualify as his own state and would frequently buy exotic animals for his private zoo and so much art that most of it would stay in boxes. He never had to worry about not having enough money. But this trope was subverted when his newspaper monopoly started to crumble and new taxes decimated the fortune in short order.
• Hearst got beaten out by John D. Rockefeller, who became the richest man of the 19th Century thanks to owning Standard Oil. He's considered to have been the wealthiest American of all time and the richest man in modern history- his personal worth was estimated in 1916 to be about 2% of the total US GDP!
• According to The Disaster Artist, Tommy Wiseau's bank account was described as a "bottomless pit" by a bank teller, with no one having any idea as to how he acquired all that money. The man financed a six-million-dollar movie out of pocket. Later investigation revealed Wiseau, for all of his obvious lack of film-making talent, was a real estate wizard.
• This is a potential flaw in the way that fiat currency works. Without a commodity backing (traditionally, gold or silver), issuers of fiat money such as the Federal Reserve can simply produce more money willy-nilly, which - if not carefully managed - leads to inevitable inflation, as the amount of currency in circulation can get arbitrarily large, but unless economic growth occurs, the currency's actual value can only decrease. Proponents argue that the process of adding more money to the economy (typically termed "Quantitative Easing"), when properly managed, kickstarts economic growth and balances out over time. The theory goes that releasing a lot of cheap credit (which is how the vast majority of new currency enters the economy) during an economic downturn can encourage businesses to expand, creating new jobs and raising wages for existing employees, which encourages wage-earners to spend, which increases corporate profits, which in turn encourages companies to expand and so on, averting the downturn before it can become a recession. But, when the process is mismanaged, corrupt at heart, or runs into an economic Outside-Context Problem like a war or natural disaster, you can end up with people taking wheelbarrows full of currency to the shop for a single loaf of bread. Your bank balance can get arbitrarily large, but if the price ticket on common items also gets comically long (or starts including letters like "K" or, god help you, "M") then it's not much comfort.
  • On the other hand, the available commodities considered suitable for backing currency - precious metals, almost invariably - suffer from the opposite problem of being an absolutely finite resource; it is estimated that all of the gold extracted in the entirety of human history would not quite fill one Olympic-sized swimming pool, so all modern economies had to abandon the gold standard because otherwise the currency would be at risk of becoming too valuable to actually use in practical contexts like, say, buying a loaf of bread.

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