No more than we could to a dying man. Only the dying man is invisible and everywhere.
Ooh, what a recyclable metaphor.
People do not forget what they're owed, nor do bankrupt businesses magic their finances back.
Money may be imaginary, but everyone keeps on imagining it, which makes the effects they expect it to have become real. You exchange imaginary entities and expect to receive real goods in return. Fortunately, the person who is gaining your imaginary entities also expects the same result, and you both act it out as if in some peculiar role-playing club. The result: you gain real products and everyone imagines you have less of this particular entity, which is why you can't just pretend to have more.
Then some people realised that money is imaginary, and that if you could get everyone to pretend they have more money than they usually imagine they have in a dangerous example of doublethink, they could exchange it for more goods than they could otherwise accumulate. So everyone starts to lend imaginary money to people while "knowing" that everyone imagines the money hasn't really gone anywhere at all. This can then be repeated, so imaginary money is imagined to be multiple places at once.
And periodically, enough people realise this, seeing through this particular veil of the charade and notice that things are more fucked up than usual. This situation is solved by fucking real things up as well, so at least reality mimics our fantasies to some degree before the economy becomes so far removed from reality (and it was never really near it to start with) that we start living in the fairyland of milk and honey while the supermarkets run dry and the fields go fallow.
All in all: we trade security in the future for gratification now. And here we are in the future, where's our security? Oh yeah, we traded it for gratification. Which, it seems, doesn't last very long.
How abstract am I, eh?
So, umm... the Stock Market
