any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular country or socio-economic context, or is easily converted to such a form. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, sometimes, a standard of deferred payment. Any item or verifiable record that fulfills these functions can be considered as money.
Questions tagged [money]
253 questions
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Money in the animal kingdom
Animals living in packs must have ways to decide how to distribute their goods among the pack members. Just like prices can appear in an exchange economy, prices could appear in pack economy. Though money can serve many different functions, are…
JJ O
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Is money a conserved quantity?
Excuse the naïve question, but I have a rather limited understanding of economics, and this question has been bothering me since my school economics teacher couldn't answer it satisfactorily many years ago. It is also a question that is a…
Anasta
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What is money really?
Say I have €1000 (or $1000) on a bank account. What is that money really?
Is it a value stored on some computer at the bank where I have the bank account, a value stored at the central bank of the currency (in the case of the euro the European…
Kevin
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Is it reasonable to consider government bonds as money
Some measures of the money supply include governments bonds... but I wonder to what degree governments bonds can be considered money.
IMHO the degree to which X can be thought of as money equals the degree to which you can easily buy things with X.…
Mick
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Do conceptual ideas that become standardised ever make money?
TL;DR - Do standardised concepts ever make money?
Recently I have been wondering if conceptual ideas ever make money, more specifically whether a conceptual idea that is standardised ever makes money? If so, how does it do this? If not, why do they…
user18815
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"Demand for money" - definition
What is the definition of "demand for money". The definition given by Wikipedia appears gibberish to me. And just to double check - what are the units of demand for money? Is it measured in "dollars"? or perhaps "dollars per unit time"? Or a ratio…
Mick
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Can the US dollar collapse and what are steps that I should take in the event that this happens?
A friend of mines says that the US dollar is so "heavily intertwined" in other nations that if the US Dollar was to become worthless then that would have a major impact on the world.
However with the little to no backing in gold and division of the…
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Relative value of medieval coins and underlying metal
If I understand correctly, in early medieval Europe (and likely at other times and places), a fluctuation in metal price occasionally made it profitable to melt down silver or gold coins. This suggests that the premium of coin value over metal value…
max
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If a business charges more for a product than the cost to make it, how is our economy not inevitably doomed for debt?
The analogy would be stirring water in a bucket; without adding more water to the bucket, there is no gain...
Obviously the various resources to create say an iPod came from different countries... but this general concept of x = 4x therefore the…
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Is there any intuitive way to distinguish "sovereign money" and "bank money"?
From this link, I saw something relating to "sovereign money"
Sovereign money is legal tender, on hand or on account as well as on
mobile storage device, in the future maybe also in the form of
so-called cryptocoins....Today, sovereign money exists…
Phil Nguyen
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Are US federal reserve notes money, or merely currency?
I have heard from my friend that US federal reserve notes (aka dollar bills) are not actually money, but merely currency. He told me that money and currency are different, and that money is currency with some extra properties. That is, all money is…
user107952
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why is Fed creation of fiat money valid?
some people suggest that the government prints money to pay its bills and that the increased amount of money in circulation lessens the value of $1. i hope to get an explanation of why both assertions are false and suggest the following:
the…
greg ciurpita
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Money creation in textbooks since McLeay et al
The paper "Money Creation in the Modern Economy" by McLeay et al was published in 2014 in the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin and has had well over a thousand citations. The paper is damming about the description of the monetary system as given…
Mick
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What would happen if, hypothetically, money velocity would reach infinity?
If, hypothetically, money velocity would reach an infinite speed, what would happen to that economy? If it would be infinite then it would mean that there would be infinite transactions and therefore Y would be infinite aswell? But infinite…
Kroko
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When and why did governments impose restrictions on money creation
In many countries governments have made laws that bar themselves from creating money directly. Instead they have to go via a circuitous route involving the creation of bonds. This means that the government has to go into debt in order to create more…
Mick
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