If the price of any durable or storable good is to remain even briefly at rest, it needs to have attained a level which divides the potential holders of this asset into Bulls and Bears of its price. For if all of them suddenly come to think alike, at that moment the price will change abruptly.#
Without this access [to external finance], the constraint of self- finance sharply biases investment strategy toward marginal variations within the traditional technology.#Quoted in Ross Levine, “Financial Development and Economic Growth: Views and Agenda” (1997)
The financial system is a “real” sector: it researches firms and managers, exerts corporate control, and facilitates risk management, exchange, and resource mobilization.#
[England’s financial] organization is so useful because it is so easily adjusted. Political economists say that capital sets towards the most profitable trades, and that it rapidly leaves the less profitable non-paying trades. But in ordinary countries this is a slow process, . . . In England, however, . . . capital runs as surely and instantly where it is most wanted, and where there is most to be made of it, as water runs to find its level.#Quoted in Ross Levine, “Financial Development and Economic Growth: Views and Agenda” (1997)
Despite the past decade’s rapid innovation in adapting blockchain technology to new uses, financial intermediation remains elusive except in basic and highly collateralized forms. We introduce the concept of the technical frontier to delimit the kinds of interactions that can feasibly be structured algorithmically among pseudonymous agents, as on a . . .