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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (215338)	1/18/2005 7:55:09 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574005

Well, what we have learned over the last century is that market dynamics wring incredible efficiencies out of systems. It might not have escaped your notice that many of the latest decision-making ventures have been modeled after bid-ask models. There was even one proposal that involved creating a futures market for terrorism related possibilities, with the theory that information flows would become super-efficient, giving a fairly accurate forecast of future terrorism events. Now that wasn't politically correct, but it was a good idea. I even watched another futures market where one asset was the presidential race. You could estimate Bush or Kerry's chances of winning based on the price of the future, which fluctuated between $0 and $100. The stock market, as you pointed out, does much the same thing. It provides a pretty darn good gauge of how companies are doing, as well as sometimes allows you to foresee when a company will shortly start to stumble, based on moves in the market. This supply and demand of information and assets is nothing like a ponzi scheme. To assert that it is completely misses the value that it brings such as an almost frictionless information source for allocating assets where they are needed most throughout our economy.