Near money
assets easily converted into cash
Near money or quasi-money consists of highly liquid assets which are not cash but can easily be converted into cash.
Examples of near money include:
Savings accounts
Money market funds
Bank time deposits (certificates of deposit)
Government treasury securities (such as T-bills)
Bonds near their redemption date
Foreign currencies, especially widely traded ones such as the US dollar, euro or yen
Some cryptocurrencies
Near money is not included in narrowly defined versions of the money supply, but broader versions include some types of near money.
History
Over the past three centuries, what has been accepted by the public as money has been expanded from gold and silver coins to include first bank notes, and then bank deposits subject to transfer by check (cheque). Until recently, most economists would have agreed that money stopped at that point. No such agreement exists today, and the definition of money appropriate to present circumstances is debated. Since the 18th century, economists have known that the amount of money in circulation is an important economic variable. As the theories became more carefully specified in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they included a variable called the money supply.
Functions of money
Money is often defined in terms of the three functions or services: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value and as a unit of account.
Medium of exchange
Money's most important function is as a medium of exchange to facilitate transactions. Without money, all transactions would have to be conducted by barter, which involves direct exchange of one good or service for another.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Near money” as assets easily converted into cash. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as assets easily converted into cash. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6984399. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Near money” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.