Technology is making it possible to collect and disseminate – in real time – information flowing through computers
Switch on any business TV channel and you’ll be bombarded with scrolling quotes and jagged graphs. It’s all very well if you like to watch that kind of thing, but the flow of financial data can lull us into an illusion: that we understand what is happening in the economy at the moment that it happens. We don’t.
Take those share prices: each one is a miniature forecast of future profits for the company in question. They may or may not be good forecasts, but what they are not is a measure of real economic activity today: the price of shares in BP reflects today’s supply and demand for shares in BP, not today’s supply and demand for petrol.