Modern finance is about ‘convenience money’, that is, having a store of liquid assets that allows firms and households to meet unplanned expenditures, or unexpected declines in income, without the bother of having to sell possessions (labour or inanimate property) or borrow in an emergency. Such convenience money is part of accumulated wealth. As globalisation has linked up local and national markets for wealth, so too it has changed the kind of money that we use.

As every textbook reminds us, to the point of tedium, money is a social convention which makes trade easier because prices are set in amounts of the money-commodity (‘unit of account’), and because the proceeds from selling commodities may be held as money until the desired commodity comes into the market (‘store of value’).