Instruments
A contract regarding any combination of capital assets is called a financial instrument, and may serve as a
- medium of exchange,
- standard of deferred payment,
- unit of account, or
- store of value.
Most indigenous forms of money (wampum, shells, tally sticks and such) and the modern fiat money is only a "symbolic" storage of value and not a real storage of value like commodity money.
Read more about this topic: Financial Capital
Famous quotes containing the word instruments:
“The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden.... Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.”
—Octave Mirbeau (1850–1917)
“Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–84)