Recent studies have replaced Finley’s and Polanyi’s model of the Mycenaean palatial economy as constituting a “massive redistributive operation” of staple goods with a more complex system highlighting wealth finance, in which high-value craft products were used as tokens of payment.  While wealth finance is a theoretical possibility, I show that there is an overwhelming amount of direct evidence that the palace made payments of all kinds with agricultural staples.  I then reexamine the evidence for Mycenaean staple finance and different modes of redistribution as a first step towards understanding how this system developed on the Greek mainland and what similarities and differences it had with Minoan systems of finance.