The MFSM first provides a set of tools for identifying, classifying, and recording stocks and flows of financial assets and liabilities. It then describes standard, analytically oriented frameworks in which the statistics may be presented and identifies a set of analytically useful aggregates within those frameworks. The International Monetary Fund (IMF, or the Fund) has designed the MFSM primarily to be useful to compilers of monetary and financial statistics, both experienced and aspiring, who are developing or updating their national statistics. It may also be useful to compilers, as well as users, of other macrostatistics in understanding the relationships among the various sets of macrostatistics.