Cost Of Money

Money can be traded for people's time, physical stuff, or rental of resources (including money). Compound interest is discussed on the NetPresentValue page.

The cost of money is time + energy (where e=mc^2).

In a Finance course I took years ago an important term is CostOfCapital. It makes the recognition that an organisation has finite resources and cannot undertake all worthwhile projects with expected positive NetPresentValue.

Bernard Lietaer wrote "the future of money" He explains all about how money works and how it could do better for the benefit of all.

http://www.transaction.net/money/

The pursuit of money can have an opportunity cost. A particularly vivid case of this is documented in 1493: New Revalations of the World Columbus Made: China, being short on precious metal and high on wealth, exported vast quantities of wealth in order to import silver to provide a currency. And this after they had already invented paper money; if only they'd avoided hyperinflation, they could have stuck to paper as a store of value, sparing themselves the need to import precious metals -- which are not actually useful for very much, except as a stable store of wealth.

Pursuing fiat currencies can have an opportunity cost too; think of the seignurage benefits that accrue to the US as the issuer of the world's reserve currency. (And think of the issues with competitor currencies -- the Euro's quirky governance and smallish economic base, China's corruption and patchy development -- that keep them from supplanting it.)