In modern industrialized societies poverty is defined as an insufficiency of money. It suggests a circular relationship between our understandings of poverty and money: poverty is the state of being deprived of money, while money is the indicator used to discriminate between rich and poor. This almost intuitive relationship between poverty and money should be further examined. On the one hand, the understanding of poverty as lack of money has been heavily criticized because it ignores the multidimensionality, practices and political economy of poverty (for example, see Bujra, 2000; UNDP, 2006; Banerjee et al, 2006). On the other hand, a problematisation of money, its origins and its diversity have been outside the scope of scholars interested in poverty studies, which have established that individuals can be deprived of money without being poor but have not looked into the links between types of poverty and means of payments. Moreover, using money comes with different costs and advantages depending on whether users are poor or rich. The higher the quality of money is, the higher the costs of using it are. Money is not a purely additive unit of account: it also comes with a measure of social value (Zelizer, 1994) and incorporates social violence as well as the tools to disguise it (Aglietta and Orléan, 2002; Bähre, 2007). The relationship between means of payment and poverty has a long historical empirical occurrence, (Marmefeld, 2018; Gómez, 2018), although it has not been traced in the way proposed in this panel. A few examples illustrate the present implications of the relationship between the poor and the means of payment they use. In current days, the Eurozone is being divided between relatively richer countries, in which small copper coins appear as a bulky and cumbersome nuisance to be disposed of, and relatively poorer countries in which a few cents make a worthwhile difference in everyday life, and deserve to be maintained. Greece and Spain are examples of the latter (Bitzenis et al. 2015; Amable, 2000; Batiz-Lazo, 2016). A second group of examples relates to financial exclusion (Demirgüç-Kunt, 2008). Paying attention to this unserved market, Facebook and two dozens of companies recently announced the proximate issuance of a new currency, the Libra, with a message precisely addressing this issue: “people with less money pay more for financial services”, calling for an innovative approach to financial services and money (Libra, White book, June 2019). A third group of examples, with cases starting at least in the ancient Roman Empire (Hollander, 2007), is composed of various camps of soldiers, slaves, prisoners and most refugees, whose residents are undoubtedly among the poor and experience problems related to money – its shortage often fuelled trafficking including sex and drugs. More and more innovative schemes related to the distribution of local or complementary currencies attempt to tackle their lack of means of specific payment to enable trade (Ranalli, 2014; UNHCR, 2018). In the three groups of cases, money circulates among the poor but has largely been designed by the non-poor and presented to them as the best solution. An alternative path is the one by which the poor themselves generate approaches or genuine local innovations in response to the drawbacks of such top-down approaches (Gomez, 2010). History and anthropology provide many examples of such agency and various situations in which the access of poorer people to money came either at a higher cost or through supplementary or peripheral means of payments. Empirical work also highlights that the classical functions of money (means of exchange, store of value, unit of account) may be coordinated in a different fashion at the bottom and at the top of the income scale. Ismael Moya thus stresses the “preference for illiquidity” of the inhabitants of Thiaroye, in the suburbs of Dakar (Senegal) (Moya, 2017), while Akinobu Kuroda shows that despite a shift to modern fiat money in China in 1935, local markets resting on locally issued private notes remained largely aloof from the national forms of liquidity, creating large conversion costs (Kuroda, 2005). Farther in the past, crises, riots and reforms show how sensitive the question of the money of the poor and its relations to the monetary system were. Contrary to what most historians of French national modernization argue, monetary riots occurred in the late 1890s fuelled by the losses incurred by small change reformation (Baubeau, 2018). Rebecca Spang showed convincingly how the small change issue influenced the monetary reforms during the French revolution (Spang, 2015). Jan Lucassen (Lucassen, 2018) proposed a general layout of the relationships between labour wages and money, and showed this relationship did not evolve linearly over time. Catherine Grandjean and Aliki Moustaka acknowledged the fiduciary character of Greek bronze coins as far back as the 5th century BC in relation to intercultural exchanges and wars (Grandjean & Moustaka, 2013). These probes in the past also help distinguish between the money “for” the poor and “by” the poor, for example in showing that the first official issuance of copper coins by the king Henri III of France was designed for alms, while during the 16th century book credit developed in England partly in reaction to small change scarcity (Muldrew, 1998). This panel proposes to study the relationship between money and poverty by rethinking the two concepts together. We propose a novel starting point, to distinguish among the moneys for the poor (designed by authorities for the poor, such as tokens in refugee' and prisoner' camps), the money of the poor (all-purpose money that the poor are most likely to use, like copper coins), and the money by the poor (designed by the poor according to their own needs, such as local currencies). Such a distinction is meant for analytical purposes but helps capture the crucial differences between means of payment that are designed and circulated in the upper strata of society and those that the poorer – not necessarily the poorest – create or adjust to their own needs. Such an approach enables us to understand the monetary conflicts of past and present societies and the limitations of a “lack of money” approach to poverty. The panel builds on the results of a program launched in the Boston WEHC 2018 session “Small Change in a Global Context: “Fractional Currencies” or “Minor Coins”?” (nb 030216), which aimed at gathering scholars in economic history, anthropology or sociology around this innovative issue.