Market Mechanisms Quotes

'Reinventing the Bazaar,' by John McMillan, is a great and fun introduction to the wild variety and importance of markets throughout history and around the world. I finally understood how a Middle Eastern souk actually works economically and how to compare that to modern-day telecom-spectrum auctions. I love that book.

Although floating and fixed rates appear dissimilar, they are members of the same freemarket family. Both operate without exchange controls and are free-market mechanisms for balance-of-payment adjustments.

Within a market, organizations have interests distinct from and often antagonistic to the market processes that produced and sustain them.

War and peace type products... cannot be added into a national product total until the differences in the valuation due to differences in the institutional mechanisms that determine their respective market prices are corrected for.

Though many corporations honor commitments to reduce dangerous pollution, some cut corners and cheat. The marketplace doesn't always have mechanisms to correct bad actors.

The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?

People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals. What I've learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse. If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.

When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.

Market mechanisms are totally irrelevant when resources are used to serve a larger purpose, especially for the underserved, unserved, or marginalised.

The normal half-brained politician sometimes doesn't understand capital markets.

Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.

In contrast, markets - oft mythologized as "natural" are the most unnatural things going. Libertarians will tell you "market laws are laws of nature", what baloney. Markets - and the other great modernist cornucopian tools - are magnificent wealth generating machines, built ad-hoc, through trial and error, constantly fine-tuned and refined, tinkered, adjusted.

One of the reasons why we can make a lot of money in equity markets is because they're auction-driven, and auction-driven markets are very different from almost any other kind of market.

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

We use competitive markets to arrange for delivery of our food supply.

A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges. Exchanges are what economists are good at.

It is clear that these are alternative methods of co-ordinating production. Yet, having regard to the fact that, if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organization at all might we ask, why is there any organization?

Markets work well with goods that economists call private goods.

All options to produce, transmit, and store electricity should be considered, driven by clear price signals and constructive government policy.

I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market.

There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work.