Negotiable instrument

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Negotiable instrument (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

• 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