A medium of exchange is an intermediary used in trade to avoid the inconveniences of a pure barter system.
By contrast, as William Stanley Jevons argued, in a barter system there must be a coincidence of wants before two people can trade – one must want exactly what the other has to offer, when and where it is offered, so that the exchange can occur. A medium of exchange permits the value of goods to be assessed and rendered in terms of the intermediary, most often, a form of money widely accepted to buy any other good.
Read more about Medium Of Exchange: Definition, Requisites Needed For A Medium of Exchange, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words medium of exchange, medium of, medium and/or exchange:
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)
“It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Life is amazing: and the teacher had better prepare himself to be a medium for that amazement.”
—Edward Blishen (b. 1920)
“So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)