My favourite PDF book has answered this question again while I'm reading it.

Money is a fulcrum of paradoxes. It is, in the famous characterisation by
Simmel, heartless – and yet, according to Zelizer, deeply emotional, ubiquitous
but elusive, uniform and endlessly varied. The paradox to be explored here is that
of the relationship between money and economic systems. This relationship is
simultaneously tight and loose. It is tight to the extent that money appears as a
fundamental dimension of the economy, a yardstick by which its growth and
wealth accumulation are measured.