Here are some hints about how the vampire egregore and its inside manifests.
As has been recently claimed by someone on /x/, vampires pay each other huge sums when doing business. This is part of an intricate but very natural system. If you are very old, you still need to have ID cards today, where it would raise suspicion if you were to claim that your age is several 100 years old. One simple way to avoid this is to do your business in cash, or by trading jewelry; gold rings, necklaces, diamonds or fine art.
Not everyone will always be super rich, but a poor vampire is a problem for everyone. Vampire "habits" require an ability to pay. This is solved by an internal cultural understanding, where vampires employ vampires, paying huge sums for menial tasks. How is this profitable, where do they get the money? It doesn't work like that, it's a circulation. You pay $100 for a cup of coffee at the vampire café, but if you were to take the role of serving coffee, you also get paid in that league. No one within vampire society gains or loses anything in a monetary aspect. It serves a few purposes: poor vampires can get employment and will soon be rich enough to pay ordinary humans for the services they need, which reduces the risk of exposure for all vampires. It also keeps outsiders out. No normal person will pay $100 for coffee at a very ordinary looking café on a back street.
The human "elites" misunderstand the purpose of this and imitate the high prices at their events, but they think it's to brag about your wealth. It's the opposite. For the vampire economy to work, there is an unspoken social standing concept involved. Everyone will instantly know, through the rumours, what your standing is. Someone who were to only work and get paid a "vampire level salary" but who never puts that kind of cash back into the vampire businesses, but only lets it leak out to ordinary humans, will have low standing. So that is why you will pay a huge sum for coffee. If it's too much, you will get change, according to the perception of your standing. So leeching vampire society to "get ordinarily rich" will quickly put you in the bottom and you may lose access to the better services. Further down the road you may get locked up for disturbing the peace, or worse.
What vampires care about is spelled quality. The process of getting there isn't important, and neither is the circulation of capital which creates it. Good quality is very difficult to find in a world where people value external social standing, comparatively. Even street thugs will want the top position in their own group. They don't know what quality is, they just think that being in the top means "quality of life." It's insects competing with insects in an ant hill, and it's still just the same hill. Rarely does an insect produce something lasting. Real quality is a product which rises above the circulation of assets and funds, something taken aside which lasts. That's the real value, and what the world economy was really tuned for in the most external view.
