Money is the bedrock of our capitalist system, but recent moves from the Trump administration have made that foundation feel a bit squishier.

Why it matters: When the public loses faith in money objects, that unmoors us and can make things feel dangerously uncertain.

Driving the news: When New York City Comptroller Brad Lander checked one of the city's 26 bank accounts on Wednesday, he noticed that $80.5 million had disappeared, clawed back by its sender, FEMA, seemingly on the orders of Elon Musk. (Musk alleged the money was earmarked to pay for hotel stays for migrants, which he said violated President Trump's executive orders.)

• On Feb. 4 the money was in the account. By Feb. 12 it was gone.
• The money was paid into the account via ACH transfer, a protocol that does allow transactions to be reversed within five business days for one of three specific reasons: It was a duplicate transaction, it was sent to the wrong account by mistake, or there was an incorrect payment amount that needs to be corrected and resent.
• Lander is adamant none of those conditions applied in this case. Musk seized the money "with no legal authority," he said in a press conference.
• DOGE and FEMA did not reply to requests for comment.

Between the lines: People talk of and think of "the money" in their bank account. The number they see when they check their balance is money.

• That is thanks to many decades of rigorous bank supervision and regulation, as well as federal deposit insurance.
• A bank deposit that can purportedly disappear at any time on someone's orders, or one that can turn worthless upon the failure of the bank, isn't money. It's something much more ephemeral than that.

Zoom in: The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration may be thinking about folding the FDIC, the agency that oversees most U.S. deposit insurance, into the Treasury.

• While there's no suggestion that deposit insurance itself might be abolished, the FDIC has become so conterminous with the concept that (unfounded) worries were quickly raised on social media about the safety of money in banks.

What's next: Trump has also ordered the Treasury to stop producing pennies, the most common form of money in existence. (Over 1.6 trillion pennies have been produced since 1793.)

• While there are lots of good reasons for the penny to be abolished, the ability to carve up cash purchases into slices of one hundredth of a dollar does give many Americans a feeling of fine-grained control over their money. In surveys, most Americans generally want to keep the penny.

Zoom out: At stake is a concept known as moneyness, which is essentially the ability of something to be money.

• "It is not always clear cut whether something should be considered a money object or not," David Orrell wrote in 2015. Orrell is a theoretician who describes money as "a powerfully psychoactive substance, which resonates in strong but unpredictable ways with human psychology."

The bottom line: Money might be a socially negotiated abstraction, but it also needs a real-world instantiation in order to exist and be useful.

• That tension has historically been carefully managed by the government, but Trump and Musk seem to have other priorities.

The office is back. The share of people who reported working mostly in-person doubled in 2024 from the previous year, according to a McKinsey survey released this morning.

Why it matters: As hiring slows and workers feel stuck, employers are using their newly strengthened upper hand to finally get what they want: butts in seats.

Where it stands: "There is a perception among senior leaders that productivity is better accomplished in office," said Brooke Weddle, a senior partner at McKinsey. (Research paints a more complicated picture.)

• Executives are keen to return to office, Weddle said, noting that in one recent 24-hour period she heard from three different leaders at three companies about it.

The big picture: This survey of 8,426 employees across 15 industries was conducted last October. The RTO push has only intensified since then.

• On Trump's first day in office he ordered federal employees back to the office. Earlier this week, Trump said: "I don't think you can work from home." People who work remotely are "gonna play tennis. They're gonna play golf...They're not working."
• Yesterday, the White House carved out an exception in its in-office policy, allowing federal employees with spouses who work for the military to continue to work remotely.

Flashback: When Amazon called workers back last September, the company opened the RTO floodgates, several observers told Axios. "That turned a wave," Weddle said.

The intrigue: At many workplaces, there's still not enough room for everyone. Amazon is still struggling to fit all its employees into available space, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

Reality check: We aren't all the way back to pre-2020 levels. Even with more RTO mandates there tends to be "wiggle room," Weddle said. "Most policies have some kind of flexibility built-in."

• For that reason, instead of asking if people were in-office or remote, McKinsey asked if people were "mostly" in-person or remote.
• Other recent studies reflect that asterisk. Average office occupancy on Fridays is just 36% of pre-pandemic levels, compared to around 63% on Tuesday, according to recent data from Kastle.

Only 13 U.S. states send more money to federal government coffers than they receive, a recent analysis found.

Why it matters: The Trump administration's push for states to become more financially independent brushes up against the reality that many depend on federal money for everything from disaster relief to food aid.

Driving the news: Massachusetts (-$4,846), New Jersey (-$4,344) and Washington (-$3,494) had the lowest balance of payments per capita as of 2022, discounting coronavirus relief spending, according to a 2024 report from the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

• New Mexico ($14,781), Maryland ($12,265) and Virginia ($11,577) had the highest.

How it works: Each state's balance of payments reflect how much federal money is distributed there (in the form of programs like Medicaid and SNAP, for example) versus how much money residents and businesses send to the federal government (via income or employment taxes, for instance).

• A negative figure means a state sends more to the federal government than it receives, while a positive figure means it gets more than it gives.

Between the lines: "States with large defense-contracting sectors and more military bases receive more federal defense spending, while federal wages are disproportionately concentrated within states with a large federal employee presence," the report noted.

• That at least partially explains the results in states like Virginia and Maryland, which are both relatively high income but have lots of federal workers, contractors and agency offices, thanks to their proximity to D.C.