Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption by Mark C. Taylor

“Though not immediately apparent, the abandonment of the gold standard has broad cultural significance. It is no exaggeration to insist that going off the gold standard was the economic equivalent of the death of God. God functions in religious systems like gold functions in economic systems: God and gold are believed to be the firm foundations that provide a secure anchor for religious, moral, and economic values. When this foundation disappears, meaning and value become unmoored and once trustworthy symbols and signs float freely in turbulent currents that are constantly shifting.
”In retrospect, it is clear that God did not simply disappear but was reborn as the market. In contemporary society, the market has become God in more than a trivial sense. The terms many economists and analysts use to describe the market implicitly suggest language once reserved for God: the market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Since the market knows best, it should be allowed to operate according to its own principle with minimal interference from humans, whose knowledge is unavoidably limited. By the late 1970s, belief in the market had become a widely accepted orthodoxy.”

-Mark C. Taylor, 2004