專欄市場價格

Why what you buy may not be worth what you will pay for it

Anyone who comments publicly on economic affairs receives regular correspondence from monetary cranks, who espouse schemes for securing peace and prosperity by reforming the world’s money. Bitcoin, the private cyber currency whose supply is fixed to prevent inflation, is only the latest entrant to a lengthy catalogue. Bitcoin also attracts anarchists and libertarians. The web should be free, they cry, blithely disregarding its dependence on telephone networks funded by middle-aged people in grey suits, servers provided by large corporations and protocols negotiated in international conferences.

Finally there are the nerds and quants, for whom the computational complexity behind the Bitcoin software is itself a virtue. The algorithms behind it are so elaborate that their implementation imposes a significant load on power supplies. Goodness knows the nature of the problem such effort is designed to solve.

The Bitcoin story stumbles towards its inevitable sad conclusion, and we will probably never penetrate the mixture of naivety and venality that lies behind it. But these events prompt reflection on the relationship between price and value. The growth of the trading culture has encouraged the belief that that the only measure of value is what someone is willing to pay. The terms “fair value” and “market price” are today used almost interchangeably. But this is a mistake.

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約翰•凱

約翰•凱(John Kay)從1995年開始爲英國《金融時報》撰寫經濟和商業的專欄。他曾經任教於倫敦商學院和牛津大學。目前他在倫敦經濟學院擔任訪問學者。他有著非常輝煌的從商經歷,曾經創辦和壯大了一家諮詢公司,然後將其轉售。約翰•凱著述甚豐,其中包括《企業成功的基礎》(Foundations of Corporate Success, 1993)、《市場的真相》(The Truth about Markets, 2003)和近期的《金融投資指南》(The Long and the Short of It: finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry)。

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