It's no big secret that the financial world is going through what can be kindly described as a catastrophic disaster. Stock markets, profit margins, layoffs - all of the meters are currently pointing somewhere between bad and worse.
Likewise, there are plenty of people out there expounding on how we got into this situation, mostly pointing at the various shell games that Wall Street has been playing with mortgages. I don't really have anything to add on the twenty plus year saga of how we've made a bubble big enough to take out neighboring markets when it popped.
Instead, I just have a very simple observation to make. One that the entire financial industry has not simply forgotten, but must continually and actively ignore in order to continue to exist.
To put it bluntly: money has no intrinsic value.
Now, before you just laugh at me, think for a moment about this idea of value, or utility. While the utility of something can vary widely from person to person, and place to place, some things are more universal. For example, no matter who you are, food has some value. Everybody eats. The value of food can be influenced by the skill with which it is prepared, or the ration between its supply and demand, but its base value is directly created by its intrinsic properties. A pound of rice is always a pound of rice, and can always be made into a meal.
So the question, then, is where does the value from money come from? Or to put it a little more viscerally, why is having a pocket full of cash better than nothing but an empty wallet?
The answer, obviously, is because you can buy stuff with it. But what if you took that option away? What good would that money do you in everybody's famous hypothetical scenario, stranded on a desert island? Quite simply, none! A hundred bucks worth of military rations would be a thousand times more valuable than a hundred dollar bill. Moneys value springs purely from our collective agreement to pretend it has value. When you take away the ability to convert money into something else with immediate value, you remove the indirect value of money, revealing its utter lack of intrinsic value.
If you're still not convinced, then ponder this riddle. If the carefully crafted metallic sculpture that we call a "coin" and mass produce at US mints has value, then why doesn't an exact replica that came from someone's basement also have the same value?
What we call the financial trading world, though, is built upon a willful ignorance of this fact. The industry is built upon layer after layer of abstraction, and at each one, the intrinsic value that is abstracted into money is further diluted.
Consider day trading. Throughout the day, any given stock will have some degree of fluctuation. Even if it ends the day at exactly the same price it started at, there will be points where the price is up, even if only a few cents, and other points where it is down. With modern computers, it is possible for even a casual investor at home to have automatic orders rapidly buy and sell the same stock over and over again. Buy the stock at $1.00, sell it at $1.05. Wait for the stock to fall back to $1.00, and do it again. In the days of conducting business over the phone, the cost of the phone calls alone could easily have swamped any profits made. In the days of computers, though, anyone can cheaply run the switch a thousand times a day, with tremendous cumulative effects.
But where did this value behind the money come from? No work was done. No commodity was created. No service was performed, or even promised. Nothing was proffered for this creation or transfer of wealth, not even a kind word. The whole stock market system was intended to be, like currency, an abstract representation of underlying value. A share of stock in a company is a voucher for a fraction of the total intrinsic value of that company.
With the introduction of computers and near instantaneous trading, though, the rules changed. The speed upped the pressure behind this loophole, and money suddenly started gushing through with disregard for the rules. Why bother with all of the tedious research, hoping that the stock will go up a substantial amount, when you can make money off of random noise? As long as the stock doesn't completely tank, you're fine!
Day trading was by no means the first means of exploiting a loophole. But in the last few decades, as regulations have simultaneously become more byzantine and less restrictive, the opportunities for making money by creatively shuffling money around have become more potentially lucrative and tempting. Why go through all the effort of actually creating intrinsic value, when you can not only carefully stack up your bills to make one plus one equal three, but do it a thousand times over?
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