Negotiable instrument

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So I took my negotiable cow
And I cashed it against the wall
I cashed it against the floor
I cashed it againt the body of a varsity cheerleader
Cashed it against the hood of a car
Cashed it against a 1981 Harley-Davidson
And I ran upstairs to my parents bedroom
Mommy and Daddy were sleeping quietly in the moonlight Slowly I opened the door
Creeping into the shadows right up to the foot of their bed I raised my negotiable instrument high above my head And just as I was about to bring it crashing down My father woke up, screaming “STOP!!” “Wait a minute! Stop it, boy! What do you think you’re doing?” “That’s no way to treat an expensive negotiable instrument!” And I said, “God damn it Daddy — you know I love you,” “But you've got a hell of a lot to learn about Rock ’n’ Roll!”

—Jim Steinman, Love, Death and an American Milking Devon

Negotiable instrument
/nɪˈgəʊʃiəbəl ˈɪnstrʊmənt/ (n.)
An instrument conferring a right to a payment of money or the delivery assets which the bearer can, without the issuer’s consent, transfer to a third party (a process known as, confusingly, as “negotiating”).

These days, negotiable instruments are more or less the same as transferable securities, but in the good old days banker’s drafts, cheques, bills of exchange, promissory notes and — well, large ruminant herbivores — which did not count as securities but were nonetheless negotiable.

The new generation of crypto-currencies (you know, like bitcoin) may just usher in a new golden era for negotiable instruments. We’ll see.

See also

• Legal instrument
• Financial instrument
• Expensive musical instrument
• The negotiable cow
• promissory note for an amusing passage from Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.
• Rome II which excludes from its ambit non-contractual disputes arising out of the negotiable nature of negotiable instruments.
• Bitcoin