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:
“But when to mischiefmortals bend their will,
How soon they find fit instruments of ill!”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)
“I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”
—William Pitt, The Elder, Lord Chatham (1708–1778)