The central question which must be answered by those who allege that we have moved into an era of postmodern economics is this: has a qualitative shift occurred in the cultural framework in which economic activity takes place? The cultural framework in this context may be taken to subsume prevailing ideas, even a prevailing ideology, about how the economy works and, more specifically, about the nature and functions of money. Postmodern theorists have misunderstood consumerism, both in respect of its novelty and its epochal significance. That consumerism could have happened at all, indeed its very ephemerality, does say something vitally important about how individuals perceive money and how they use it. The ensuing depression in consumer spending during the early 1990s, the very extremity of the contrast between this stagnation and the preceding fluidity, does not indicate some kind of return to the caution of the cultural type characteristic of Adam Smith's beloved saver, for it has been no less celebrated and intensified, or rather spectacularly mourned, by, through and within the media industry than were the heights of consumerism. More seriously, perhaps, postmodern accounts of consumerism are mistaken in the more fundamental sense of never getting to grips with its core features.