Negotiable instrument

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”).

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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