Price Expectations In Goods And Financial Markets

Economists and scholars in related fields discuss the concept of rationality of expectations from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view, and at both individual and collective levels. Concerning the first aspect, the book focuses on how agents collect and process information and how market opinion is formed. Concerning the second aspect, it presents studies based on individual price expectations and on the consensus revealed by survey data. Contributors analyze price expectations in a variety of markets, periods, and countries, paying special attention to financial markets which have represented the main field of study over the last ten years. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

A powerful challenge to contemporary economics and a new agenda for global finance In the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2007, faith in the rationality of markets has lost ground to a new faith in their irrationality. The problem, Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg argue, is that both the rational and behavioral theories of the market rest on the same fatal assumption—that markets act mechanically and economic change is fully predictable. In Beyond Mechanical Markets, Frydman and Goldberg show how the failure to abandon this assumption hinders our understanding of how markets work, why price swings help allocate capital to worthy companies, and what role government can and can't play. The financial crisis, Frydman and Goldberg argue, was made more likely, if not inevitable, by contemporary economic theory, yet its core tenets remain unchanged today. In response, the authors show how imperfect knowledge economics, an approach they pioneered, provides a better understanding of markets and the financial crisis. Frydman and Goldberg deliver a withering critique of the widely accepted view that the boom in equity prices that ended in 2007 was a bubble fueled by herd psychology. They argue, instead, that price swings are driven by individuals' ever-imperfect interpretations of the significance of economic fundamentals for future prices and risk. Because swings are at the heart of a dynamic economy, reforms should aim only to curb their excesses. Showing why we are being dangerously led astray by thinking of markets as predictably rational or irrational, Beyond Mechanical Markets presents a powerful challenge to conventional economic wisdom that we can't afford to ignore.

Finance is an area of business practice that has been deeply influenced by theoretical developments. This book provides the basic theoretical foundations necessary to understand how three broad classes of assets - stocks, options and bonds - are valued on financial markets, while developing the crucial concepts of market equilibrium and arbitrage. The analysis is rigorous, yet successfully bridges the gap between mathematical and non-mathematical approaches to provide a book which will be of interest to both academics and practitioners.

Why are financial prices so much more crisis-prone and unstable than real economy prices? Because they are doing different things. Unlike real economy prices, rooted in the real goods and services produced and exchanged, financial prices attempt to value future income flows from financial and capital assets. These valuations fluctuate erratically because expectations of the future fluctuate – and large liquid financial markets can amplify, rather than correct, these effects. The book builds on the insights of economists Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes, that uncertainty of the future is essential to understand the processes of economic production and capital investment, and adds to this Karl Popper's general explanation of how expectations of an uncertain future are formed and tested through a trial and error process. Rather than relying on fluctuating financial prices to provide a guide to an uncertain future, it suggests a better approach would be to adopt the methods common to other branches of science, and create testable (falsifiable) theories allowing reasonable predictions to be made. In finance, the elements of one such theory could be based on the concept of forecasting yield from capital assets, which is a measurable phenomenon tending towards aggregate and long-term stability, and where there is a plentiful supply of historic data. By methods like this, financial economics could become a branch of science like any other. To buttress this approach, the widely accepted public policy objective of promoting real economy price stability could be widened to include financial price stability.

Takes the mystery out of financial markets by providing a straightforward analytical framework for trading. Offers a unifying rationale for technical analysis of markets, making it more of a ``science'' than ever before. Begins with a discussion of how emotional elements permeate economic and financial behaviors and how forecasters can remain independent from such behavior. The more reliable theories of natural systems and price pulse--continuously recurring price patterns--are introduced and examined in detail. The author shows analysts how to use these techniques to forecast price movement profile, extent, and timing of reversals, putting investors on the road to trading with minimum risk and maximum success.

Financial Markets and the Real Economy reviews the current academic literature on the macroeconomics of finance.

There is a common perception that the prices of unrelated commodities move together. This paper re-examines this notion, using a measure of comovement of economic time series called concordance. Concordance measures the proportion of time that the prices of two commodities are concurrently in the same boom period or same slump period. Using data on the prices of several unrelated commodities, the paper finds no evidence of comovement in commodity prices. The results carry an important policy implication, as the study provides no support for earlier claims of irrational trading behavior by participants in world commodity markets.