The [credit] card was no more than a device bearing symbols for the exchange of monetary value. That it took the form of a piece of plastic was nothing but an accident of time and circumstance. We were really in the business of the exchange of monetary value.(Hock 2005: 143)

Hock’s marginalization of the role of plastic is to be expected, given the way in which monetary objects are thought about–both popularly and in social scientific discourse–as things that come to matter because of their ability to negate their materiality and act as passive mediators of value. This chapter, however, opens up for examination this simple ‘accident of time and circumstance’, and explores how the plastic in the plastic card can indeed matter to the composition of the consumer credit market assemblage, in both moments of borrowing and default. 1