1  General Definition of Money

Money is an agreement, between a community, to use something as a medium of exchange, which acts as an intermediary market good. It can be traded and exchanged for other goods. The agreement can either be explicit or implicit, freely chosen, or coerced. Money is an abstract form of power. As discussed below, money also has other characteristics.

Money itself must be a scarce good. Many items have been used as money, from naturally scarce precious metals and conch shells through cigarettes to entirely artificial money such as banknotes.

Modern money (and most ancient money too) is essentially a token - an abstraction. Paper (fiat) currency is perhaps the most common type of physical money today. However, goods such as gold or silver retain many of the essential properties of money.

2  Essential Characteristics of Money

Money has the following three characteristics:-

1. It must be a medium of exchange

When an object is in demand primarily for its use in exchange -- for its ability to be used in trade to exchange for other things -- then it has this property.
This characteristic allows money to be a standard of deferred payment, i.e., a tool for the payment of debt.

2. It must be a unit of account

When the value of a good is frequently used to measure or compare the value of other goods or where its value is used to denominate debts then it is functioning as a unit of account.  A debt or an IOU can not serve as a unit of account because its value is specified by comparison to some external reference value, some actual unit of account that may be used for settlement.  For example, if in some cultures people are inclined to measure the worth of things with reference to goats then we would regard goats as the dominant unit of account in that culture. For instance we may say that today a horse is worth 10 goats and a good hut is worth 45 goats. We would also say that an IOU denominated in goats would change value at much the same rate as real goats.

3. It must be a store of value

When an object is purchased primarily to store value for future trade then it is being used as a store of value. For example, a sawmill might maintain an inventory of lumber that has market value. Likewise it might keep a cash box that has some currency that holds market value. Both would represent a store of value because through trade they can be reliably converted to other goods at some future date. Most non-perishable goods have this quality.

Many goods or tokens have some of the characteristics outlined above. However no good or token is money unless it can satisfy all three criteria.

back to top

3  Credit as Money

Credit is often loosely referred to as money. However credit only satisfies items one and three of the above "Essential Characteristics of Money" criteria. Credit completely fails criteria number two. Hence to be strictly accurate credit is a money substitute and not money proper.

This distinction between money and credit causes much confusion in discussions of monetary theory. In lay terms credit and money are frequently used interchangeably. Even in economics credit is often referred to as money. For example, bank deposits are generally included in summations of the national broad money supply. However any detailed study of monetary theory needs to recognize the proper distinction between money and credit.  The rest of this article frequently uses the term money in the looser sense of the word.

back to top

4  Related concepts

The dominant coins and bills used within a particular country or trade region is called a currency.  See also standard of deferred payment.  Many people collect money. See numismatics.
 

back to top
 

5  Desirable features of money

To function as money in a modern economy, a good or token should possess a number of features:-
It must have a stable value.
It must be difficult to counterfeit.
It must be easily divisible and transportable.
It must be fungible. That is, one artefact of the token or good must be equivalent to another.

back to top

6  Modern forms of money

When using money anonymously, the most common methods are cash (either coin or banknotes) and stored-value cards.
When using money substitutes in such a way as to leave a financial record of the transaction, the most common methods are cheques, debit cards, credit cards, and digital cash.

back to top

7  Money and economics

Money is one of the most central topics studied in economics and forms its most cogent link to finance.
The amount of money in an economy directly affects inflation and interest rates and hence has profound effects. A monetary crisis can have very significant economic effects, particularly if it leads to monetary failure and the adoption of a much less efficient barter economy. This happened in Russia (for instance) during the 1990s.

Modern economics also faces difficulty in deciding what exactly 'is' money. See money supply.

There have been many historical arguments regarding the combination of money's functions, some arguing that they need more separation and that a single unit is insufficient to deal with them all. These arguments are covered in financial capital which is a more general and inclusive term for all liquid instruments, whether or not they are a uniformly recognized tender.

back to top

8  History of money

8.1 Before money

Prior to the introduction of money, barter was the only way to exchange goods. Bartering has several problems, most notably timing constraints. If you wish to trade pigs for wheat, you can only do this when the pigs and wheat are both available at the same time and place - and without proper storage that may be a very brief time. With a trade standard like gold, you can sell your pigs at the "best time" and take the gold coins. You can then use that gold to buy wheat when the harvest comes in. Thus the use of money makes all commodities become more liquid.

Where trade is common, barter systems usually lead quite rapidly to the emergence of several key goods with monetary properties. In the early British colony of New South Wales in Australia, rum emerged quite soon after settlement as the most monetary of goods. When a nation is without a fiat currency system it is quite common for the fiat currency of a neighbouring nation to emerge as the dominant monetary good.  In some prisons where conventional money is prohibited it is quite common for goods such as cigarettes to take on a monetary quality. Gold has emerged naturally from the world of barter again and again to take on a monetary function. It should be noted that the emergence of monetary goods is not dependent on central authority or government. It is a quite natural market phenomenon.

back to top
 

8.2 Commodity money
 

Precious metals have been a common form of money, such as this gold from Sveriges Riksbank.
The first instances of money were objects which were useful for their intrinsic value. This was known as commodity money and included any commonly-available commodity that has intrinsic value; historical examples include pigs, rare seashells, whale's teeth, and (often) cattle. In medieval Iraq, bread was used as an early form of currency.
Even in the industrialised world, in the absence of other types of money, people have occasionally used commodities such as tobacco as money. This last happened on a wide scale after World War II when cigarettes became used unofficially in Europe, in parallel with other currencies, for a short time.

Another example of "commodity money" is shell money in the Solomon Islands. Shells are painstakingly chipped into rough circles, filed down, and threaded onto large necklaces, which are then used during marriage proposals; for instance, a father may charge twenty shell money necklaces for his daughter's hand in marriage.
One interesting example of commodity money is the huge limestone coins from the Micronesian island of Yap, quarried at great peril from a source several hundred miles away. The value of the coin was determined by its size — the largest of which could range from nine to twelve feet in diameter and weigh several tons. Displaying a large coin, often outside one's home, was a considerable status symbol and source of prestige in that society. (Due to the great inconvenience, islanders would often trade only promises of ownership of an individual coin instead of actually moving it. In some cases, coins which had been lost at sea were still used for exchange in this way. These agreements could be thought of as a kind of representative money, described below.)

Once a commodity becomes used as money, it takes on a value that is often a bit different from what the commodity is intrinsically worth or useful for. Being able to use something as money in a society adds an extra use to it, and so adds value to it. This extra use is a convention of society, and how extensive the use of money is within the society will affect the value of the monetary commodity. So although commodity money is real, it should not be seen as having a fixed value in absolute terms. Its value is still socially determined to a large extent. A prime example is gold, which has been valued differently by many different societies, but perhaps none valued it more than those who used it as money. Fluctuations in the value of commodity money can be strongly influenced by supply and demand whether current or predicted (i.e. if you know the local gold mine is about to run out of ore, the relative market value of gold may go up in anticipation of a shortage).

Money can be anything that the parties agree is tradable, but the usability of a particular sort of money varies widely. Desirable features of a good basis for money include being able to be stored for long periods of time, dense so it can be carried around easily, and difficult to find on its own so that it is actually worth something. Again, supply and demand play a key role in determining value.
Metals like gold and silver have been used as commodity money for thousands of years, being in the form of metal dust, nuggets, rings, bracelets and assorted pieces. Eventually the Lydians began coining gold and silver around 650BC.

Gold and silver are both quite soft metals, and coins minted from the pure metals suffer from wear or deformation in daily use. Fortunately these metals are also easily alloyed with a less expensive metal, frequently copper, in order to improve the durability of the resulting coins. Typically alloys of coinage metals, such as sterling silver or 22 carat gold, are used to make coins more durable. These are alloys of 90% or more precious metal as alloys of less than 90% do not improve hardness or durability very much, and so are typically considered to be on the slippery slope into monetary debasement.

back to top

8.3 Standardized Coinage

It was the discovery of the touchstone that paved the way for metal-based commodity money and coinage. Any soft metal can be tested for purity on a touchstone, allowing one to quickly calculate the total content of a particular metal in a lump. Gold is a soft metal, which is also hard to come by, dense, and storable. For these reasons gold as a money spread very quickly from Asia Minor where it first gained wide use, to the entire world.

Using such a system still required several steps and some math. The touchstone allowed you to estimate the amount of gold in an alloy, which was then multiplied by the weight to find the amount of gold alone in a lump.  To make this process easier, the concept of standard coinage was introduced. Coins were pre-weighed and pre-alloyed, so as long as you were aware of the origin of the coin, no use of the touchstone was required. Coins were typically minted by governments in a carefully protected process, and then stamped with an emblem that guaranteed the weight and value of the metal. It was however extremely common for governments to assert that the value of such money lay in its emblem and to subsequently debase the currency by lowering the content of valuable metal.

Although gold and silver were commonly used to mint coins, other metals could be used. Ancient Sparta minted coins from iron to discourage its citizens from engaging in foreign trade. In the early seventeenth century Sweden lacked more precious metal and so produced "plate money," which were large slabs of copper approximately 50cm or more in length and width, appropriately stamped with indications of their value.  Metal based coins had the advantage of carrying their value within the coins themselves — they induced on the other hand manipulations: the clipping of coins in attempts to get and recycle the precious metal. The bigger problem was the simple co-existence of gold, silver and copper coins in Europe's nations. English and Spanish traders valued gold coins at a higher rate of silver coins than their neighbours would do, with the effect that the English gold-based guinea coin began to rise against the English silver based crown in the 1670s and 1680s and with the consequence that silver was ultimately pulled out of England for dubious amounts of gold coming into the country at a rate no other European nation would share. The effect was worsened with Asian traders not sharing the European appreciation of gold altogether — gold left Asia and silver left Europe in quantities European observers like Isaac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint observed with uneasiness.

Stability came into the system with national Banks guaranteeing to change money into gold at a promised rate, it did, however, not come easily. The Bank of England risked a national financial catastrophe in the 1730s when customers demanded their money to be changed into gold in a moment of crisis.  Eventually London's merchants saved the bank and the nation with financial guarantees.
See also: Roman currency, coinage metal, for conversions of the European coins before the introduction of paper money:  The Marteau Early 18th-Century Currency Converter

back to top

8.4 Representative money

An example of representative money, this 1896 note could be exchanged for five US Dollars worth of silver.  The system of commodity money in many instances evolved into a system of representative money. In this system, the material that constitutes the money itself had very little intrinsic value, but none the less such money achieves significant market value through being scarce as an artefact.
Paper currency and non-precious coinage was backed by a government or bank's promise to redeem it for a given weight of precious metal, such as silver.  This is the origin of the term "British Pound" for instance; it was a unit of money backed by a Tower pound of sterling silver - hence the currency Pound Sterling.  For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many currencies were based on representative money through the use of the gold standard.

back to top

8.5 Fiat money

An example of fiat money is the new, international currency, the Euro. Its introduction changed the face of money, superseding many of the world's oldest currencies.

Fiat money refers to money that is not backed by reserves of another commodity. The money itself is given value by government fiat (Latin for "let it be done") or decree, enforcing legal tender laws, previously known as "forced tender", whereby debtors are legally relieved of the debt if they (offer to) pay it off in the government's money. By law the refusal of "legal tender" money in favour of some other form of payment is illegal, and has at times in history (Rome under Diocletian, and post-revolutionary France during the collapse of the assignats) invoked the death penalty.

Governments through history have often switched to forms of fiat money in times of need such as war, sometimes by suspending the service they provided of exchanging their money for gold, and other times by simply printing the money that they needed. When governments produce money more rapidly than economic growth, the money supply overtakes economic value. Therefore, the excess money eventually dilutes the market value of all money issued. This is called inflation. See open market operations.
In 1971 the US finally switched to fiat money indefinitely. At this point in time many of the economically developed countries' currencies were fixed to the US dollar (see Bretton Woods system), and so this single step meant that much of the western world's currencies became fiat money based.

Following the first Gulf War the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, repealed the existing Iraqi fiat currency and replaced it with a new currency. However, the old currency continued to be used in the politically isolated Kurdish regions of Iraq.  Despite having no backing by a commodity and with no central authority mandating its use or defending its value it continued to circulate within this Kurdish region. It became known as the Swiss Dinar. This currency remained relatively strong and stable for over a decade. It was formally replaced following the second Gulf War.

back to top

8.6 Credit money

Credit money often exists in parallel with other money such as Fiat money or commodity money, and from the user's point of view is indistinguishable from it. Most of the western world's money is credit money derived from national fiat money currencies.

Strictly speaking, a debt is not money, primarily because debt can not act as a unit of account. All debts are denominated in units of something external to the debt. Hence credit money is not strictly money at all. However, credit money certainly acts as a money substitute when it comes to the other functions of money (medium of exchange and store of value). As such the existence of credit money may dampen demand for the real money and in so doing alter the dynamics of money's market value.

When paper money is merely an IOU for something such as gold, then the paper itself is not a unit of account but merely a convenient medium of exchange. Under a rigid gold-standard with convertibility, paper currency is merely a debt instrument. However, when paper money floats, its value is not defined by reference to an external unit of account. It is no longer a debt instrument but rather it becomes purely monetary and its value is a product of the dynamics of supply and demand. Typically a central bank forces supply and the private sector forces demand. See open market operations.

Credit money tends to arise as a by-product of lending and borrowing money. The following example illustrates this -
Imagine you have deposited some gold coins in a bank vault. The bank might lend the coins to a second person based on a promise to pay equivalent coins back with a few extra at a time in the future. The second person can in the meantime use the coins normally as money. But you still own the coins, and you also could still use them - you could transfer their ownership to another person to pay for something you have bought by telling the bank to transfer them from your account to the other person's account. You might do this by writing a check. So in this simple example there are two people using the same coins as money at the same time. It's as if new money has been created by the act of lending. Taking it another step, if the second person spends the coins at a shop, and they end up being deposited back into the bank by the shopkeeper, the bank can lend them again. Now you and the shopkeeper can use the coins in the same way, by writing checks or the equivalent in this example, and whoever borrows the coins a second time can use the coins directly as money. So there are three people with financial use of the coins. This can go on with many people ending up simultaneously using the same coins financially, but for each extra user there is a promise to pay equivalent coins back.

These arrangements where many people use the same money simultaneously are in many respects the same as if there was extra money. The extra money that there appears to be is known as credit money. It is in regulating the amount of money a bank can lend that the controlling authority can set the money supply and change monetary policy. The credible promises to repay in a reasonable time give the extra money its value. It tends to exist in parallel with another form of money such as fiat money or commodity money, wherever banking-style loans are used, and occurs as a by-product of lending. It could occur without banks, but banks provide a degree of stability to the whole process by taking and evaluating the risk involved in each loan.

During the Crusades in Europe, precious goods would be entrusted to the Catholic Church's Knights Templar, who effectively created a system of modern credit accounts. Over time this system grew into the credit money that we know today, where banks create money by approving loans - although the risk and reserve policies of each national central bank sets a limit on this, requiring banks to keep reserves of fiat money to back their deposits. Sometimes, as in the U.S.A. during the Great Depression or the Savings and Loan crisis, trust in bank policies drops very low and government must intervene to keep the industry of credit in operation.

back to top

9  Private currencies
 

A private $1 note, issued by the "Delaware Bridge Company" of New Jersey 1836-1841.

In many countries, the issue of private paper currencies has been severely restricted by law.  In the United States, the Free Banking Era lasted between 1837 and 1866, during which almost anyone could issue their own paper money. States, municipalities, private banks, railroad and construction companies, stores, restaurants, churches and individuals printed an estimated 8,000 different monies by 1860. If the issuer went bankrupt, closed, left town, or otherwise went out of business the note would be worthless. Such organizations earned the nickname of "wildcat banks" for a reputation of unreliability and that they were often situated in far-off, unpopulated locales that were said to be more apt to wildcats than people. The National Bank Act of 1863 ended this period.
In Australia, the Notes Act of 1910 basically shut down the circulation of private currencies by imposing a prohibitive tax on the practice. Many other nations have similar such policies that eliminate private sector competition.

Today there are several privately issued digital currencies in circulation that function as money. Transactions in these currencies represent an annual turnover value in billions of US dollars.  Many of these private currencies are backed by older forms of money such as gold.   (see also electronic bullion investment).

In Scotland and Northern Ireland private sector banks are licensed to print their own paper money by the government.

back to top