Standard of deferred payment

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In economics, standard of deferred payment is a function of money. It is the function of being a widely accepted way to value a debt, thereby allowing goods and services to be acquired now and paid for in the future.^[1]

The 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons, influential in the study of money, considered it to be one of four fundamental functions of money, the other three being medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. However, most modern textbooks now list only the other three functions, considering standard of deferred payment to be subsumed by the others.

Most forms of money can act as standards of deferred payment including commodity money, representative money and most commonly fiat money. Representative and fiat money often exist in digital form as well as physical tokens such as coins and notes.