This article describes and analyses the conceptualisation of money (and related notions) in Romanian banking discourse in the context of a financial crisis. The theoretical framework used for the analysis is that of conceptual metaphor in its discursive shape in which metaphoric scenarios have an important role. The data is composed of 74 documents issued by four Romanian banks, before and during the financial crisis (2007-2009) forming two subcorpora of approximately 25 000 words. The analysis shows a high degree of variation in the metaphoric expressions of conceptualisations. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the metaphoric expressions (with source domains such as medicine, army or water) are connected, reflecting three coherent and interrelated scenarios: a caring scenario, a physical force scenario and a river scenario. It is argued that these scenarios reinforce the others’ effects in persuading recipients of certain ideas, inducing feelings, hiding agency, and even creating identities, and as a result they help transfer ideologies.