Centralized money is good for storing value. As such, centralized money is useful for pricing assets and for enabling the hoarding of those who price assets.
The pricing of the assets happens in stock or asset exchanges, where assets are traded. The prices of assets depend much on their liquidity, on the ease with which they can become repositories of stored value, on the ease with which they can retain their value and be resold at that retained value. Because it is a measure of the ability for the asset to be resold, an asset’s liquidity is as much a mass-psychological phenomenon as any real factors in the economic system. As a result, the prices of suddenly liquifying assets and commodities can rise, bubble-like fashion, until the supply of centralized money being hoarded for just such a transaction has been used up, at which point the exchange crashes, triggering the attendant panics in the real economy. In the meantime, though, the real economy will have been distorted by the attention that was paid to the storage of value rather than to the creation and the circulation of value the economy requires.
Like the rosh hayeshiva who wishes to make everyone a talmudic scholar, the powers-that-be in a 'free market' society would like to make everyone day traders or asset traders or people who are able to trade on account of their access to assets rather than to make people enhance their productive capacity.
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