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What Is Money?

24 April, 2015 - 11:52

Learning Objectives

  • Define money and discuss its three basic functions.
  • Distinguish between commodity money and fiat money, giving examples of each.
  • Define what is meant by the money supply and tell what is included in the Federal Reserve System’s two definitions of it (M1 and M2).

If cigarettes and mackerel can be used as money, then just what is money? Money is anything that serves as a medium of exchange. A medium of exchange is anything that is widely accepted as a means of payment. In Romania under Communist Party rule in the 1980s, for example, Kent cigarettes served as a medium of exchange; the fact that they could be exchanged for other goods and services made them money.

Money, ultimately, is defined by people and what they do. When people use something as a medium of exchange, it becomes money. If people were to begin accepting basketballs as payment for most goods and services, basketballs would be money. We will learn in this chapter that changes in the way people use money have created new types of money and changed the way money is measured in recent decades.