| Akatosh Vivec (Fearless Blue) | Monday, October 27, 2008 - 06:15 am 
"A commodity is anything for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. In other words, copper is copper. Rice is rice."
We have a share market, common market, local market, international market, etc. However, we do not have a commodity market in the sense of *futures*.
Futures are basically demand for an item on what it is predicted to be *in the future*. I must admit I am not entirely familiar with how products are priced -- however, a commodity market is a way to effectively price all goods and services not based on some arbitrary scarcity of the product, but on how much the *market* (countries, corporations, enterprises, etc) *value* the commodity itself.
Instead of a product being worth $20 because Corporation A produced 2 but the "real" demand is 4, in a commodity market the product is worth $20 because the given *value* by the market mechanics -- it is why oil was ~$120-140 for so long -- the *value* was supposed to be up in that range, until the 'bubble' popped. But that is true market mechanics for you.
I just want to start a conversation, and see what others in the community think. |
| Asmodeus (Little Upsilon) | Monday, October 27, 2008 - 11:05 pm
to make something clear: I love your proposal.
However, the amount of oversight required is a little much. Like with the suggested creation of the "bond" market, there are major implementation challenges involved, to point some simple ones out:
There are 100% debt Guarantees. With guarantees, there is no risk, no risk, should mean no reward.
The current market prices, are not 100% governed by supply and demand. While supply/demand do affect pricing, they do not do it to a large extent; meaning that the occasional crashes are actually from game itself. This is good in a sense where you cannot have a collection of players crash an item at will, but bad, in the sense that it makes it arbitrary.
All loans are repaid. Problem with that, is simple, again, there is no risk, and therefore there shouldn't be a reward (this one's actually true, 30% per RL year, is BLOODY NUTS!) but, since you're always going to get your money back, with interest, there is no bad points to loans.
I love increasing the economic complexity of this game, and am all for it; but I do remember - since it wasn't soo long ago - how it was when I started. If it wasn't for the extreme amounts of help from the community, I'd STILL be lost, and that's with the game on "coast/auto"... |
