Velocity of money
One of the fundamental tenets of capitalism is that pricing signal directs economic activity to the most efficient place. In the new world though money can be redeployed with a click of the mouse whereas the rest of the components of economic activity, e.g. labor, can’t be diverted as easily. I wonder if there has been research done to see if this diversion in the rate of redeployment of different elements is creating anomalies.
Here are some possibilities -
- As suspected by most, most famously by Warren Buffet, all the innovation in financial products has probably had very little effect on creating value. It certainly diverted a lot of resources to creating profit for Wall Street as the share of profit earned by financial industry rose dramatically. It is much harder to know if this capital which was being cycled through endless derivatives and hedge funds and proprietary trading desks could have been deployed to more productive use.
- One place where velocity of money might have helped is accelerate creative destruction by making junk bonds available for LBOs. This has probably helped companies being restructured when they had ceased to be efficient..
