Speculative investing weaken the stability of the stock market

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With Neutro on our side, we can gather all the world's wealth in a day! Thus making the money worthless because of simple economics! Averted in Fullmetal Alchemistwhere one of the three laws all alchemists must follow is to not transmute gold, even though it is a simple transmutation in The Versein order to keep the economy from destabilizing.

This law, is, of course, broken by Ed albeit by being a fraudand transmuting elements will signify you're in possession of something you really shouldn't have. They take the money that people lose gambling to feed the Monster of the Weekin an effort to bankrupt the world by robbing it of all its hard cash.

They never once consider there are other units of measuring assets, which include stocks, bonds, certificates of deposit, precious metals, gems, and real estate.

The entire ingredients-based economy in Toriko should have failed plenty of times over. Food, while very important, isn't the most important thing when building a civilization with a monetary system. Not to mention that the main character — who eats more than an entire continent's worth of people — can cash things on a "gold card" that has no limit and apparently he never has to pay.

Toriko has a huge income from selling the things he hunts and does not eat, even given that that's a minority of what he catches. He regularly comes to the market with extremely expensive rare ingredients. Played for Laughs with the Paradise Group's scheme in One-Punch Man.

They want to make a world wherein people only have to work if they want to, and those who don't work are fully financially supported. They don't seem to know that this is not at all how economics work, but then again they really aren't all that smart. He is told that it's more gold than he could spend in a lifetime. But he can't have the princess, who, of course, is off to an arranged marriage with a prince she doesn't love.

So as a romantic gesture, the pilot gets back in his plane and throws all the gold dust into the air around the ship that's taking the princess away. The value of the gold in the economy? The gold itself as raw material, for decorative or practical purposes? Economics majors will cry, but not for the reasons the writers wanted.

Wayne Enterprises ; an entity with infinite spending power and zero paper trail. Citizens of Tontecarlo do not have jobs: The main characters, visiting tourists, notice that money flow cannot continue; however, tourism brings more money to Tontecarlo. Marvel Comics used this and 'damn the expenses' as a plot point in 's Secret War: Red Son where Lex Luthor solves the budget deficit problem by Later, Superman's Soviet Russia drives America to ruin via embargo - being Superman, breaking said embargo is not healthy for one's life.

Everyone in the comic treats it as a way to produce some quick cash for running expenses by duplicating blutoks and eebeb pearls, which are the main legal currencies of the galaxy. They also copy rare objects considered valuable for their history, at times. Depending on the writer, Scrooge McDuck would sometimes attempt to make money through undertakings that cost more in the execution than any expected profit margin could cover freighting in ice from the arctic?

On one occasion, he attempted to swindle an inheritance from Donald, despite the clear paper trail establishing Donald as the rightful one, and even brought along Donald as hired help! One story has Scrooge for some inexplicable, out-of-character reason worry that he was making money faster than he could spend, and took Donald and the nephews along for a lengthy, extravagant trip where they wasted tons of money on cars and food.

When they returned home, Scrooge had made even more money because, everything they bought having come from his own businesses, the money spent failed to deduct from his fortune while his regular business interests continued to generate money. More generally, some have tried to argue that Scrooge was a living danger to world economics since he's getting richer everyday while he doesn't send back much money in the outside world given how stingy he isso in a very small time he would possess all the money in the world which would then become worthless since it would be concentrated into one person.

The writers, however, managed to avoid this issue in three ways. First, it has been long-established that Scrooge doesn't care if his money is worthless, since he never spends any what he enjoys with having money is contemplating the coins and swimming in them. And second, it is also established that there are at least two other characters who do as much money as Scrooge at approximately the same rate: Flintheart Glomgold and John D.

Then, even if most of the world's money is probably concentrated in the three duck's pockets, they hate each other so much that none of the three would accept to leave money to the two others, keeping economics to be ruled by one undisputed leader technically, Scrooge's the richest of the three, but only because he owns a few more inches of old string, so it counts for the Guiness World Records but doesn't matter at the Stock Exchange.

And, last, Scrooge once was placed in a situation where winning in one day three times his current fortune would cause the death of the city of Duckburg.

Scrooge, being kind-hearted under his tough exteriors, burnt the document who allowed him to ask the city this amount of money. Altogether averted in an old Carl Barks story, "A Financial Fable", where a freak hurricane blasts Scrooge's fortune across the countryside, but he remains uncharacteristically calm and jovial, and settles down to tend a farm. Meanwhile everybody in miles' vicinity, including Donald, gets millions deposited right on their laps. Subsequently everyone decides that they are rich and no longer need to work, instead trying to go see the world and spend their money on luxuries, only to realise that no-one is selling anything and all industry is going to a standstill due to everybody being "rich".

Soon enough they all are forced to buy their food and basic commodities from the only person who kept working all this time, Scrooge McDuck, himself, who naturally charges by the present rated value, several million dollars for a modest meal, and soon enough all the cash has flown back to his pockets, restoring the financial equilibrium.

A Spy Kids comic in one issue of Disney Adventures had the evil organization F. Fear, ANger, Greed plan to destroy all the cereal in the world so that everyone would be forced to buy "Fang Flakes" for a million dollars each.

Yeah, have fun having no business at all with those prices. Lampshaded when it turned out F. In the Web of Spider-Man episode titled "Gold Rush! But in reality, that would no more destroy the world economy than would a major gold strike in the mining industry. It would depress gold prices for a while, but since no one uses the gold standard anymore, it would have very little effect beyond that. Doesn't stop Spidey from swiping one item, a gold notepad, though; he just uses it to help pay off Aunt May's home to prevent it from being repossessed.

The truth is that the competitor has been waiting for any spark of doubt such as this and influenced the market accordingly to make it look like the Big Bad was going under for years.

It's still done in a day though which is too fast. In the Love Hina fanfiction RepercussionsKitsune steals 30, yen from Keitaro to buy booze. When she is caught, she is told that she will be expected to pay it back or elseand that she will have to work for a long time to do so. With a full-time job, Kitsune should be able to pay it off in a matter of weeks. Discussed by James in Common Sense when the Magikarp salesman gives his pitch about how Magikarp lays one thousand eggs at a time.

He instantly sees through the ruse, because if it's really such a fast multiplier, basic laws of supply and demand state that its real value would be nowhere near what the salesman claims.

In Euro Tripthe exchange rate in Slovakia is taken to parodic levels. It seems that having less than two dollars in American money makes them part of the wealthy ruling class, including a stay at a five-star hotel and access to an exclusive nightclub. Scott flips one of the servants an American nickel, who promptly quits and tells his manager that he will open his own hotel.

The Russian fantasy film Sadko known to MST3K fans as The Magic Voyage of Sinbadhas the main hero try to help out his home town by forcing its merchants to redistribute their wealth among the poor.

It doesn't work so well since there doesn't seem to be enough to go around. That, and the hero ends up giving away all the money he was going to use for his quest.

The original story had him trying to buy all the goods in the city and monopolize the trade. Turned out the external trade scale was quite out of his league. In Canadian Baconthe president wanted to start some international problems so he'd have an excuse to reopen the recently closed munitions factories given the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Then again, his primary goal was really just to stir up Patriotic Fervor and boost his popularity. The Mexican satirical film Un Mundo Maravilloso portrays an alternate Mexico which simultaneously has economic growth and stability and rampant poverty, widespread unemployment and plunging stock markets at the same time.

In The Fifth ElementZorg espouses the "Destruction Equals Employment" mentality, and demonstrates it by destroying a glass and explaining how the machines that clean the glass shards away employ so many people manufacturing them.

However, Zorg doesn't mention that only companies like his, which profits off of war, stand to benefit, rather than society as a whole. In Wisdoma film starring Emilio Estevez and Demi Moorethe titular character, John Wisdom, goes on a bank-robbing spree, but not to steal money. Instead, he and his girlfriend destroy bank property records to help farmers.

The film was released ina time when American farmers were having problems keeping their farms. The banks were seen to be the bad guys because they were the ones foreclosing when the farmers couldn't make the payments on the loans.

In the film, John Wisdom is seen as a modern-day Robin Hood because he saves the farmers from foreclosure. Apparently, in the movie, the banks that are hit only have one copy of the records and when Wisdom destroys these records, there are no ill effects on the local economies.

Some Truth in Television: As this was before the computer ageit's more likely that the banks indeed had only one copy of the records, or at least the loan notes. John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd were known to do this as well. In general, many outlaws recognized the only way they would avoid capture would be to invoke Robin Hood kind of banditry, so a sympathetic public would shelter them. Certainly the public had no love lost over banks for, then as now, financiers would be happy to push loans for farm expansion with high interest rates in times of boom, knowing that the increase in product supply would make repayment unlikely as prices fell accordingly.

Likewise, some European peasant rebellions were actually better thought-out than most people realize, in that the rebels would destroy any documents they found in the keeping of tax agents and other local officials. Their hope was that, even if their uprisings failed, there wouldn't be any record of just how much service they owed their manor lords each year.

In Street FighterBison pays his underlings with "Bison Dollars", which are technically worthless due to having no economic backing, but Bison plans to force the Bank of England to value them at five pounds per Bison dollar, by kidnapping their Queen.

And that's assuming everyone involved would accept financial ruin just to save figurehead nobility. Then again, while a Magnificent BastardBison is utterly insaneand the smarter of his accomplices reject the currency as worthless. Both Jorgy and Larry in their big speeches. Jorgy talks about how the wire and cable industry will recover when the dollar is a little stronger and the yen is a little weaker; actually, that would just mean that an American company like his would get priced out of the market by its Japanese competitors.

On the other hand, Larry says that the fastest way to go broke is to have an increasing share of a shrinking market; that's true if and only if the market shrinks away to nothing, which is unlikely to happen for products like wire and cable. Otherwise, having an increasing share of a shrinking market is a way to become spectacularly profitable, since it eliminates all your competitors.

The Mayflowers' plan in Hudson Hawk is to find Leonardo da Vinci's machine for turning lead into gold, and using it to turn gold into Worthless Yellow Rocks and crash the world currency market. This is in fact good economics—in a world where currency is still backed by gold. However, the film was released in the early sat which point the only major currency linked to gold was the Swiss franc.

While that would be enough to make for some nasty economic problems, it wouldn't be nearly sufficient to hold the world economy hostage. On the other hand, the Mayflowers are cartoonish villains in a slapstick comedy. It doesn't have to make sense.

The backstory to National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets is that John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators had a clue to the lost City of Goldand tried to recruit Gates's ancestor to help them find it so they could restart The American Civil War. Fortunately he burned the clue the same night Lincoln was assassinated.

But by that time the remaining Confederate leaders had surrendered, the Confederate armies had disbanded, the Union occupied all the important southern cities and forts, and the people had long lost their will to continue fighting.

In short, no amount of money could possibly have restarted the war. In Time is set In a World That actually could work rather well Added to that, there is the problem that they are using as currency something with a large intrinsic value of its own: The whole point of money is that it's a medium of exchange; ideally, it should have no value of its own.

Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: A justified use of the trope, as the way Gekko makes money is indeed a zero sum game. While absolute wealth and value can be increased, relative wealth is pretty much constant.

If you embrace the concept of the the positional good as Gekko seems tothen you only advance by getting ahead of others. If wealth is a measuring stick for status and control, you don't want "enough", you want more than everyone else. Whether the economics are flawed or not depends on whether you accept that concept or not.

John Nash in A Beautiful Mind erroneously defines a Nash Equilibrium. A beautiful blonde woman walks into a bar with her supposedly less attractive friends. He suggests that if they all target her, she will turn them all down and her less-attractive friends will spurn them because nobody likes being second-choice. However, a Nash equilibrium is defined as a set of strategies for each player where no player has an incentive to unilaterally change his choice of action, holding all other players' actions as given — in the example, every individual has an incentive to unilaterally deviate by adjusting his strategy and hitting on the blonde.

Actually, it would have to go way deeper than that. First, you have to find out how much "pleasure" hooking up with the blonde or her less attractive partner would yield.

Then you'd have to calculate the chances of success. If, for the sake of simplicity, the blonde is four times more "pleasure giving" and both will choose one suitor randomly, then four times as many people should hit on the blonde as on her companion.

Now, everyone deviating from their strategy will suffer an expected pleasure drawback. Of course, this would not take into account differing tastes, uncertainties, preferred strategies risk aversion and suchlikethe ability of the women to have a mind of their own and so on In The Dark Knight RisesBruce Wayne is bankrupted after Bane and his minions break into the stock exchange, hold everyone there at gunpoint, and make fake trades in Bruce's name using his stolen fingerprints.

In reality, the major stock exchanges have the ability to quickly cancel trades if necessary and Bruce Wayne would have been easily able to get off the hook for those fraudulent trades. This is acknowledged in the movie a couple of scenes later when Lucius Fox tells Bruce that they'll be able to prove fraud but that in the immediate short term, Bruce is bankrupted. This also assumes that the computer program wasn't somehow inserting backdated trades into the system.

Though that would presumably leave a trace, it would certainly take much longer to disentangle. The whole situation is played similarly to a robbery or large-scale embezzlement. It's lampshaded by people on the floor. This is a stock exchange, not a bank. There's no money for you to steal! Michael Crichton 's novel Rising Sun is accused of using the 'Exporting Good, Importing Bad' fallacy quite egregiously. The Girl Who Owned a City runs into Ridiculous Rationality pretty hard as explained here.

Each presumably very radiation-tolerant alien stored his stash of coins in the basement, and if it accumulated too many, it was automatically removed from the gene pool. In The Pillars of the Earth Ken Follett doesn't seem to know that no stonemason in the medieval world "lost his job". Crafts were guild-based, not capitalist; guilds protected their members from destitution, so a stonemason would no more be impoverished by losing one client than a modern lawyer would.

And there are apparently no religious orders, godparents, or childless neighbors that will take in children whose parents cannot care for them. These are probably Rule of Straw Medievalismthough. The Imperial Order from Sword of Truth is an incredibly large empire with a massive standing army capable of sending millions of people hundreds of miles away to conquer the world, while operating under an economic system so ridiculous it should be incapable of supporting a single city, much less an army.

Essentially, it combines all the motivation problems of communist economics with a culture that actively despises hard work. This has been going on for hundreds of years, and does not seem to have had any effect on the value of gold.

However, each Hall a type of Crafting guild, 10 in all and each Hold over 20 worldwide has their own special and specific source stamp. The value of these marks has been shown, in canon, to vary on the cultural popularity of the Hall or Hold they hail from. In the first novel of the series HarperCraft marks were worthless, as Harpers were seen as trifling entertainers instead of educators.

The theory here is sound a "mark" represents a promise of X amount of goods or services from the issuerand is similar to many historic and modern "private currencies". The problem lies entirely in the books' descriptions. Some of the price discrepancies may be due to the relative scarcity of goods on Pern. Until the Southern Continent was reopened in the books, wood was a lot more rare, since the Northern Continent is mostly rocky and mountainous. This was especially the case up until the long Interval that ended during the first book, since the Dragonriders kept a very tight control on the amount of greenery they had to protect before then.

Even in later books, wooden furniture is considered a luxury item; most people make do with stone. Metal of all kinds have always been very rare on Pern, that's one of the reasons it appealed to the back-to-nature colonists who wanted to set up Pern as an agrarian society. That's probably why marks are made of wood; metal's too valuable to waste on coinage. Invoked in The Pale Kingduring Chris's description of the new tax laws in Chicago in Since the amount of taxes that needed to be paid were determined by the amount you spent per transaction, people did their shopping by buying one item at a time.

The resulting lines and traffic are horrendous, and the governor loses his job over it. A strange, and amusing, example occurs in The Lost Hero. King Midas yes that King Midas is bankrolling the Big Bad 's efforts by That would work as long as you didn't overdo it.

It's not substantially different than financing your operations with proceeds from a gold mine. If the mine were so productive that the price of gold collapsed, that wouldn't work either. And yet gold mines can be quite profitable enterprises in real life, and are usually more profitable the more productive they are. Could be justified in that Midas is older than modern economics and probably wouldn't understand how it works. Scott Fitzgerald 's Diamond As Big As The Ritz.

The Washington family discovers a mountain made entirely of solid diamond, but cashing in would lower the value of diamonds to next to nothing and leave the family near-broke. Today, the mountain would not necessarily be rendered worthless though—today, more diamonds are used for industrial purposes than as jewelry.

However, Fitzgerald wrote before this was a common industrial practice. When a huge nickel-iron meteorite really more of a small asteroid crashes into the Antarctic and is found to have contained significant veins of ore rich in, among other things, goldkeeping this discovery secret to avoid the obvious potential rush and impact on the global economy is just about the first thing on the mind of everyone in the know.

It's the effectiveness of the method by which the secret wealth is nonetheless exploited and dealt with that comes across as dubious — basically, counting on nobody asking too many uncomfortable questions and on people valuing gold more than "inferior" paper money thereby prompting them to hoard rather than spend ita secret benevolent government conspiracy springs into existence in order to quietly mine the impact crater and allow those governments to return to a gold currency.

In the novel, it works; of course, this kind of ignores that the total worldwide gold supply still has increased quite significantly by the end of it and that all favorable psychological factors aside it'd still be silly to expect millions of people to trade in one form of money for another just so they can then sit on the latter while still being out of the former. The very similar and earlier book The Chase of the Golden Meteor by Jules Verne completely averts this - by not allowing the meteor's gold to enter into the economy in the first place.

The meteor falls into the ocean before any of the people trying to obtain it can reach it. One of secondary characters even exploits this to get insanely rich, by buying out the stocks of gold mining companies that fell in price after the news of a golden meteor, and ending up as a monopoly gold supplier once the meteor gets destroyed the guy kinda expected the whole hoopla to end this way.

Inc In Action the kingdom of Possiltum's expansion campaign enjoys massive popular support because the people have been led to believe that a wider tax base will decrease their individual taxes. It's only late in the novel that it's pointed out the extra layers of bureaucracy will cancel out any increased revenue from new taxpayers. In The Leonard Regime any money that exists has become a currency for use solely within the black market, somehow making it even more valuable than before.

Shows up in American Gods of all places, where the narration dismisses the term "Information Age" and insists that all of history could be accurately described as an Information Age since information has always been one of the most important resources. But most of what that term actually refers to is a rise in the availability of information, not its value and where the rising value of the latter is merely symptomatic of the rise of the former.

Played for Laughs several times in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series: In the first book, the planet-makers of Magrathea are said to have been so successful at selling custom planets that they bankrupted the galactic economy.

Ford Prefect even calls Magrathea a fairy tale that mothers tell their children when they want them to grow up to be economists. In the second book and the secondary phase of the radio play on which it is basedthe " Shoe Event Horizon " is presented as the moment in which a planet's population has become so obsessed with the buying of shoes that no other business is economically feasible, causing economic and societal ruin.

One species responded to this by evolving into birds who have no need for shoes. The Golgafrinchams who settle Earth decide to adopt leaves as legal tender. This of course creates a massive problem of inflation where several forests are required to buy a single peanut. In order to try and revalue the leaf they start burning down all of the forests in the area.

How did speculative investing weaken the stability of the stock market

In The Lost Fleetboth the Alliance and the Syndicate have somehow managed to maintain a Total War Economy for decades as the result of a century-long war, something which extremely hard to establish and even harder to sustain if you want your society to remain functioning long enough to produce another generation of workers and soldiers, especially given that the average lifespan of the typical multi-million or billion credit warship used in the war was less than three years due to the frequent violent battles and poor tactics Not to mention casualties on said destroyed ships tend to be at least half of the crew, causing a massive drain of manpower.

Though to be fair, its strongly implied that both sides were reaching the limits of how long they could keep this up, and even if Geary hadn't managed to win the war, it would have ended within a decade as both economies collapsed.

HyperVolatility |

The concept of Municipal Darwinism presented in Mortal Engines really doesn't make a lot of sense: You move a literally city-sized mass of people, buildings, and machinery around on wheels, burning god knows how much fuel per second, dealing with what must be staggering maintenance costs and trying to absorb unimaginable initial investments All so you can steal some pitiful resources from smaller, less successful cities trying to do the same thing a labour-intensive process that involves tearing apart lots of valuable infrastructure in the target city.

In ArrowIsabel Rochev manipulates Oliver into making her acting CEO of Queen Consolidated so that she can impoverish his family by making all their stock in the company worthless. This would never work, for the simple reason that the Queens are the majority stockholders in the company, so Oliver can remove her as CEO, and will likely have the support of the rest of the stockholders once it becomes obvious that she's ruining the company.

Also, the only way to render all the Queens' stock worthless would be to so badly manage the company that it became valueless, which she can't do without both getting removed as CEO very quickly and ruining her reputation in the business world, which at that time she still valued, to average salary for a stockbroker nothing of devaluing all the stock she herself had bought.

On top of all of that, it is extremely unlikely that the Queens would have no other assets other than their stock in the company. At the very least, it is likely that they would own their palatial mansion outright. In Auction Kingsthe Garrett brothers in particular seem to have no problem buying a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff in Michigan and then driving it all the way to Atlanta, Georgia to sell it.

Even when they make a profit, the transit costs and auction fees would eat up much of the profit. Though the fact that transit fees at least are probably tax-deductible business expenses probably helps. Villain Sue Pelant forces Hodgins to choose between saving some children and stopping Pelant from draining his millions of dollars from his accounts to be used for further evil. Hodgins chooses to save the kids, but he xml stock market quotes have been able to do both.

It's not like Pelant's bank would have just put millions of dollars into a duffel bag for him to carry out of there; the money exists electronically, it isn't physically gone. In reality, all Hodgins would have had to do was call up his bank and say, "I did not authorize those transfers, put my money back.

In fact, the bank probably should not have done the transfers to begin with. If you were running a bank, wouldn't you be suspicious of a transaction that involved a rich man giving every penny he had to another guy? The Season 4 Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned" features a cruise ship of Human Aliens from the planet Sto, which apparently has some major economic problems. A couple claims that they'll never be able to pay off the credit debt they ran to get their tickets.

At the end of the episode, the Doctor establishes a firm conversion rate: This occurs during the same night. Peggy Bundy gets hired as a cosmetic door-to-door saleswoman, and soon she makes best employee on sales. She buys her own goods for ten times what her salary is! Al facepalms when he realizes what she's been doing and how she put the family in even more great debt. One episode had the team infiltrate a group of neo-Nazis who had a Swiss Bank Account showing the location of a cache of Nazi Gold which they intended to use to create a "Fourth Reich.

And yet they thought it was believable enough to not only make nyse trading hours december 2016, but re make it for the later MI series. The plot in one episode of the original series, where a banker was plotting on flooding an African country with well-made forgeries and a lot of them, makes more sense, both from the money and economic standpoint.

Another one had a man making enough high-grade forgeries of a nation's currency to purchase the entire gold reserve of a nation that was presumably on the gold standard, which makes sense so long as the world can honestly believe that a nation on the gold standard would have enough currency in open circulation that one person could plausibly accumulate enough of it to do this without there being an obvious shortage of said currency everywhere else in the world.

Monty Python's Flying Circus: Dennis Moore is a parody agglomeration of all the old folk heroes who "robbed from the rich and gave to the poor". He did so well he bankrupted the aristocrats but kept trying to rob them. I've got a tiara Take day trading forex inside hat off! Oh, honestly, it's absolutely pointless trying to do this if you're going to cheat.

It really is awful of you. There are millions upon millions of worlds in the universe, each one filled with too much of one thing, and not enough of another. And the Great Continuum flows through them all like a mighty river, from "have" to "want" and back again!

And if we navigate the Continuum with skill and grace, our ship will be filled with everything our hearts desire! Calvin opens a lemonade stand in the dead of winter. When he doesn't get any customers he decides the solution is to raise the price even further so he can become profitable more quickly. However, since lemonade isn't a Giffen good, this likely won't work.

Another case was when he started taking selling lemonade too seriously. His price is, again, 1920s stock broker high fifteen buckswhich he justifies by having to appease his "stockholders" himself and pay "employee benefits" for himself.

When Susie points out that he's ninjatrader forex interactive brokers even selling lemonade, but rather a pitcher of "sludge water" with a lemon in it, his response is "I'd have to charge more if I followed health regulations" and "I have to cut expenses SOMEwhere if I want to stay competitive".

This is all Played for Laughs and, sure enough, nobody buys from him. Jeff Foxworthy used this in one of his early stand up routines. Well, you can't write me a check?

Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money! Tell you what, I'm going to go ahead and pay the whole thing off, right now.

Tabletop role playing games in general are extremely vulnerable to this due to economics outside the party usually not being the focus of the game design and Combinatorial Explosion setting in: Since there's no engine limitation on what the PCs can or can't do, any imbalance in the economic system can be exploited.

The usual result is a gentlemen's agreement about not abusing the most blatantly illogical parts. Older games justify this with the player characters not being professional merchants or being too busy with the adventure to use more than the most basic of merchant skills and the prices and variation in the manual being what a customer can expect for small-volume purchases and transactions.

Newer games written with the trope in mind tend to be Aversions by enforcing the above mechanically. If you're just buying a widget, look up widgets in table "Widget prices". If you're attempting to make a profit off of buying and selling widgets, your actions have an actual impact on the market, so instead roll against your "day trading" skill and look up how much profit you're making per day.

Still a simplification, but one that addresses the usual specific complaint. Gary Gygax lampshaded that the economic system of 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Strategia fibonacciego forex didn't work, particularly with all the gold and jewels being taken into or out of the economy at different times, but it was justified due to Rule of Cool: Not that this prevented many player characters from going after the copper and silver coins too Later editions still have quirks.

In fact, it's perfectly profitable for players to employ laborers whose daily salary is less than the profit made on a single ladder-to-poles conversion to do this all day. Similarly, a spiked chain is cheaper than the same length of normal chain. Players could generate as much money as they needed just by being in the business of hiring laborers to craft these items all day long An article in an earlys issue of Dragon discussed how to make a more realistic-looking lookingmind, which even the author admitted to economic situation by exploring real historic currencies, including making silver the dominant high-value coinage instead of gold.

Platinum was thrown out of consideration entirely as it was not considered a precious metal or even particularly well known before the s.

Rolemaster 's coinage hierarchy used to place tin coins below copper. And to add insult to injury, Bronze 50 pips a day forex strategy damir are worth more than Copper Pieces in the same coinage hierarchy.

By melting it down you could get enough steel to forge 15 coins. Putting rule issues like that and selling a 10 foot ladder as 2 foot poles, the idea is decent enough, the execution just stinks. The argument is that steel is more valuable than gold because steel is useful, whereas gold is pretty but useless, therefore steel is worth more.

Which completely misses the point of currency. Interestingly enough, Sparta did use iron money. The idea was actually solid: Only Sparta could mint their own coins correctly forgery was too hard to be worth it and merchants bartered goods with Spartans.

Theoretically, you could try to buy a Spartan off with a year's worth of Wheat, but where was he going to hide that? The idea that steel should be more valuable than gold because it is more useful than gold is ridiculous, since money should, ideally, have no intrinsic value or use other than as a medium of exchange, but there's nothing particularly problematic about using steel coins as money.

Modern American coins, for example, are made of various mixtures of copper, zinc, and nickel, which are hardly precious metals. Most modern circulating currency is made of paper well, cloth, technicallywhich is also of no particular value.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with making money out of steel. In a World of Darkness manual, the author describes in great length how the extremely long-term strategic planning of centuries-old vampiric masterminds make US berg company adopted a stock-option plan on november European companies competitive against Japanese ones.

Whether it's an economic Fail or not is dependent on how rigid that long-term plan is, and a key thing to remember is that a business run by immortals is likely to be more patient about returns than one held by mortals. In theory, there should be less emphasis on small short-term gains at the expense of larger long-term ones.

Pathfinder had a wonky economy which allowed one to buy mithril chain shirts and melt them down for a fraction of the price of raw mithril. Legend of the Five Ringsbeing based on feudal Japan and China, has a rice-based economy where one gold koku is the equivalent to the amount of rice one man will eat in a year.

Or possibly what one family will eat in a year. There's some confusion as to which. Also, the exchange rate between gold, silver and copper coins means that even the smallest denomination of money in Rokugan is a fairly vast fortune. The handwave given is that it is beneath a samurai's station to be concerned with money, and that there is a sizable merchant class to deal with such matters. The Hand Wave in later editions is that the value of currency has significantly inflated in the past few centuries, and it now takes somewhere from 12 to 15 koku to feed a man for a year.

This dramatically cheapens raw gold, but it brings the price of food in line with the price of everything else. Da Orks of the Warhammer 40, universe actually use their teeth as money. Disgusting, and also guarantees high inflation since they keep growing back their teeth like sharks, although the teeth do degrade with time.

They also forex enigma reviews a barter economy in weaponry and "shiny fingz", which can be traded for each other.

Not to mention perpetual war that guarantees consumption too high to leave any surplus for investment. Of course, due to their ingrained belief that the strong rule the weak, simply taking someone else's teeth or goods when you can is considered totally legitimate. Taking it by stealth instead of force is considered cheating though.

Avalon Hill's was more guilty of Artistic License Finance, but that's probably close enough. The way the game worked was that, when a railroad had its initial public offering, or float, the first share sold was the President's share and was worth two regular shares, and the player who bought it controlled the company.

The company did not go into business, however, until a majority of the shares had been sold, all of which had to be sold at the initially offered value. Once the company had started operating, its share price could fluctuate, meaning that if the price went up, you could realize an immediate gain by buying leftover IPO shares at the initial value, even though they would immediately have the floating value.

Obviously that makes no sense, since why would the company sell shares for less than their publicly traded value? Also, that's just not how IPO's work. In real life, obviously, there is no such thing as a President's share. Moreover, all issued shares will typically be sold in an IPO. If the shares do not all sell at their initial price, the price will fall until all issued shares have been sold.

The other big problem in the game was that a railroad's stock price was almost solely a function of its dividend policy. If it issued a dividend, the price went up, but if it retained its earnings, the stock price went down. That generally meant that it was impossible to continue expanding a railroad once its start-up capital was exhausted, at least not without killing the stock price. Needless to say, investors are not, as a class, that short-sighted. Corporations regularly retain earnings in order to expand, and investors generally like that, since it means that dividends will be higher later.

Some investors are short-term players, but plenty are not. Expansion does not call options msft hurt a company's stock price; taking losses does. What stockholders do not like, aside from forex trading ezine, obviously, is when a corporation sits on a lot of cash without either investing it in expansion or paying it out as dividends.

That can often lead to a strike suit. Role Playing Games in general tend to fall under this, as Random Encounters provide an extremely high, if not unlimited, supply of gold.

Inflation should have wiped out any and all economies years ago. Especially in any town in Dragon Quest surrounded by Gold Golems, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin and are a walking retirement fund. One has to appeal to Gameplay and Story Segregation to make it coherent. Maybe justifiable in games where NPCs portray monsters as dangerous beings to be feared, so the average person would be lucky to escape alive from an encounter with one.

Only world-saving chosen heroes will go around killing monsters in numbers, and there aren't enough people like that to significantly affect the economy.

Some games handwave it as an insta-bounty on the monster, or instead has the monster drop Vendor Trash to sell. Others handwave it by declaring that each monster Was Once a Manor ate someone and thus may plausibly still have money on in them. Karl Marx Hates Your Guts. Not only is monster killing the easiest way to make money, it is often the only way to make money - no part of the entire economy can exist without regular infusions of cash from busting open a Money Spider.

This probably explains why every shop in the game seems to be a Trauma Innor a weapon, magic, or item shop. The Legend of Zelda combines the mentioned 'unlimited money' problem with a strict, if odd, aversion of the Wallet of Holding: Depending on the game, you can collect any number of rupees easily, but you are limited to how much you can carry.

Purchasing model risk for european-style stock index options most expensive items costs more money than any wallet short of a one-of-a-kind magical artifact can ever hold. Makes you wonder who they planned to sell those items to, or why they don't offer loans. The most hilarious example is the bomb merchant in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Wakerwho 'sells' his bombs for several orders of magnitude more rupees than you could possibly carry.

He seems mighty pleased with his exploitation of his monopoly, forgetting that if you offer your products for several times the total wealth of the planet, no one who can go without the product will buy it, and those who can't go without it will just steal it, as the pirates do later in the story.

The real reason for the outlandish prices is of course to serve as a Broken Bridgepreventing you from obtaining bombs too early in the story. A milder example would be the magic bean seller in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Timewho thinks that any business is an indication of high demand which justifies raising his prices by 10 rupees a bean And only selling one at a time. This despite the fact that he explicitly mentions that he only has one customer. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princessthere is a shop that sells common goods for insane prices One might blame Fantastic Racism for the fact that the fancy shop gets more attention than the Gorons, but even granted their monopoly otherwise, it's unlikely enough customers are able to afford the goods to keep the shop in business which, granted, may be why it's so easy for Malo to buy it out In Ultima VII Part II: Serpent Isleyou can learn a spell that summons money from nowhere.

The question of inflation is obviously not addressed. Prior to acquiring this spell, the player runs into a group of corrupt pike men who have 'arrested' the captain of the player's ship and want a bribe fine of a gold bar to release him and let you get on with the game. It has to be a gold sv-60 trading system. You can offer them thousands of Monetari the local currencybut they will always demand a gold bar.

Many walkthroughs have mocked this, but given the existence of the spell, the pike men may be more canny than one would think. This may be due to a bug, as the game manual states that the money created by the spell is temporary, which it actually isn't in-game. Ultima VII also has a spell to create gold, but that one actually works in a way which wouldn't ruin the economy.

The particular spell turns a chunk of lead into a gold nugget. The catch is, that is only worth ten gold, and the ingredients to cast the spell cost more than that and unlike Serpent Isle with the expansion, there is no free unlimited source of ingredients.

Doing this speculative investing weaken the stability of the stock market a large scale would devalue gold itself, but even a medieval economy can be based on other measures of value. This is particularly a major problem in MMOswhere, like their single-player counterparts, money is generated indefinitely by the players when they kill monsters or complete quests.

Since an MMO, unlike a single-player game, actually has a persistent economy, this usually results in runaway inflation which developers usually attempt to curtail, to varying degrees of success, with "money sinks" — constant fees for things like travel, equipment maintenance, or all-but-essential sundries, and one-time expenditures of huge amounts of wealth for things that look cool but have little gameplay value.

One notable aversion to this is City of Heroeswhich does not give actual currency to its heroes, villains, and Mirror Universe Grey and Gray Morality It gives Influence, Infamy, and Information, respectively. So, in effect, players are being given futures market hours today goodies by shopkeepers out of respect, fear or in exchange for information.

The player market is also meddled with by the devs every now and then to keep prices from spiraling out of control. EVE Online has a very realistic economy. Unlike in most games where NPC shops have an infinite supply of items to sell, and will buy anything you offer them, Eve has almost no NPC buyers or sellers.

If you want to sell anything, you have to find another player willing to buy it. All the ships, weapons and ammo in the game are manufactured by other players from raw materials mined at some point by even more players. If you suddenly need a large amount of a rare item, you have to make it yourself or pay someone to do it for you and then someone else to ship it to your location.

Heck, some of the larger clans have been able to successfully engage in economic warfare by buying up goods and weapons required for an upcoming clan battle, driving up the price of those items so the enemy cannot even begin to afford it. The Pend Insurance corporation, however, Fails Economics Forever. Interestingly, Ramin Shokrizade who worked at CCP in the early days of EVE blogged about how EVE's economic model was so true-to-life that he found it a good predictor of the Great Recession of Specifically, in the early days of the game most factories were bought up by speculators who sat on them and waited to sell them at high prices to other people who actually wanted the production capacity of those factories.

This unfortunately made the game not a lot of fun to play for a lot of people who got locked out of the economic loop by not buying in very early, so they released a patch to make rent paid on those factories much higher than it used to be. This had the effect of reducing speculation and real-estate day trading rules for iras, as only those who would actually profit by the sale of factory produce would find it profitable to own one.

However, in the few months it took to get the patch out, it made a small number of early factory speculators fabulously wealthy. Dynasty Warriors Online averts this rather well. You never get money from nowhere. You're either paid by your general or you're getting it from selling stuff you found on the battlefield.

While earlier RPGs and by extension MMOs tended to give the players direct funds for defeating an enemy, newer MMOs tend to lean towards giving players random types of loot, which are usually parts of the creature killed and harvested. They are then traded for actual money, which can be spent on armor, weapons and potions which are supposedly made from the refined bits of the loot people collect and sells.

However due to the needs of a game, the actual spawn rate equivalent to the birth rate in Real Life is unrealistically fast, making overharvesting an impossibility which is a major problem in the real world. Diablo II had a big problem in that gold coins were so easy to obtain in large amounts that the multiplayer economy was unwilling to accept them as a currency.

The economy turned to barter and finally started using Stone of Jordan rings which were valuable enough and rare enough to be used as a currency for high value items. Later on various runes were used as an alternate currency. Ikariam manages to avoid much destruction equals employment by having islands with only one kind of luxury good thus players mock stock trading india build an effective 'one town war machine'; they could exist but the player would need to raid ''a lot'' and utilizes a building called the "Trading Post" to encourage peaceful trading between players.

The Red Moon Online: One item, called a "poison pill", was necessary to use regularly to make the game playable. The game had no upper limit on how many of a single item you could carry. So, many people stocked up on this item until a few people had millions of poison pills.

Since there was a maximum number of poison pills in the game, no more were dropping and the price skyrocketed. They were going for millions of gold, far more money than most players had seen. Give 1 million gold to every account one day. As you can imagine, the poison pills were soon going for hundreds of millions.

The first game tried to avert this by having item prices based on simple supply and demand. While a good idea in theory, it was very easy to exploit for more money than you'd ever need, very early in the game. The player could buy out a well-stocked item all at once, and get a low price for all of them.

The same shopkeeper, now needing to restock that item, would immediately be willing to buy it all back at a significantly higher price, only to sell the well-stocked item for a pittance again. With a business model like this, one wonders how they manage to stay afloat, let alone make any profit. Fable II is no better: The player can buy shops and houses, and can set the price level on them. No one ever pays attention if a shop a few hundred yards away is selling the same thing at half the price you are.

The only real disincentive for raising prices is a hit on the Karma Meter. Slightly averted in that if you own enough shops in one area, you can affect how good the economy as a whole is doing. Also, it's realistically possible for the player to actually own every property in the country. However, in real life, even if you have a monopoly, you make the most profit by setting prices slightly higher than they would normally be. If you raise them through the roof, you'll make less some people can do without, or just don't have the moneyand if the good is really inelastic like, say, waterit travelocity stock market spark a revolution at some point.

The "evil" choices increase your revenue raising taxes, turning an orphanage into a brothel, etc. The "good" choices often cost you money but make people happy such as refusing to mine resources under a lake because "it's pretty". Once the choice is made, the decision is irrevocable, even after you fend off the country-destroying Eldritch Abomination.

No mention is made of telling the public why you are doing these things, or leaving open the possibility of tightening the belts for one year, fighting off the threat, then changing things afterwards. One option, for example, is to rebuild a section of the city destroyed when you seized power. If you choose not to rebuild it when offered the chance, it never gets rebuilt. Counter-Strike had this problem when it decided to go to a market-based system to determine the price of weapons.

In theory, this would currency exchange rates today karachi a real-time game balance to each weapon - good ones would go up in price, bad ones would go down. Their problem was that their algorithm to determine what the prices of each weapon would be was bizarre: The new price for each weapon is based on the total amount of money spent on that weapon.

The percentage of money spent on each weapon during the week is used to determine the percentage by which its price moves the next week. Discussed in El Goonish Shive: I can totally hook you up with straw turned to gold. I'm already worth millions, and you'd just be devaluing gold in general forex trading systems software download you made digg audio money maker construction loop. Sir, it's one thing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It's quite another to nuke the entire farm. The Irate Gamer in his I Rate the 80s series shows he has no idea how businesses work. He complained that Kool-Aid no longer sold gimmick flavors, wondering why they stopped, and hoping they bring them back. Not once considering that these flavors didn't sell compared to the more popular flavors.

Linkara and Lee from Still Gaming love pointing out the illogic of "collector's editions" of both comics and collectible cards, respectively. This is also known as "Baseball Card Tuition Syndrome", as an infamous example described by Lee involved people gathering up baseball cards in the 70's and 80's, believing that they'd be able to pay for their kids' tuition in 20 years with them.

The problem is a lack of understanding of supply and demand; most of the more expensive comics and cards out there were made in a day where it wasn't common to print them in the quantities they print them out, nowadays hundreds of copies instead of hundred thousandswould not have very many copies in good condition still in existence, and are usually the first ever issues of world-famous characters like Spider-Man or Batman.

Sadly, the companies also know this binary options platform from 101 deliberately hype up the label of "collector's edition" to get more buyers.

This kind of market eventually backfired with serious consequences. Once people realized they were buying worthless piles of paper, they stopped buying comics and comic companies suddenly had stockpiles of hundreds of thousands of comics they couldn't sell. This led to a huge comic book crash which the industry never fully recovered from. Another notable thing about why first editions of Action Comics 1 the first appearance of Superman ever comic sell for millions is that many of them were destroyed in paper drives in World War IIwhich meant only a handful survived in any readable condition at all.

This Go Animate video has a Red Lobster shutting down and a Buffalo Wild Wings on the verge of closing because of Daisy's Blatant Lies and Insane Troll Logic driving away a few customers. Keyword here being "a few": Happens in the Van Beuren Felix the Cat short "The Goose that laid the Golden Egg", which starts with Felix handing out whole piles of gold coins to the poor, and the short ends with the entire town being flooded with countless loads of gold.

Felix does not realize that creating that much gold would make it worthless as a result. South Park Parodied when Canada goes on strike and demands more money, specifically from the Internet, and completely ignores the people who try to explain that is not the way economics works. Also parodied when Randy thinks that the only way to fix the economy is not just for people to stop wasteful spending that they can't afford, but for people to stop spending any money at all.

Not to mention the Underpants Gnomes: Collect underpants, Phase The King of Balbadd adopted the Kou Empire's Currency system, which used paper money as opposed to their coin one, without having the market prepped for the introduction of this new currency — resulting in inflation rates that not only left a majority of the citizens destitute, but also fuels animosity towards the royal family and higher class who ended up benefiting from this to the point that the bad guys are able to incite a violent revolution against them.

And what's worse — the King and the other nobles became so addicted to the currency and the lavish lifestyle that came with it that the King agreed to marry the Empire's Princess and was willing to sign a contract that used the citizens as collateral via slaveryjust to get more money!

For example, babysitting, hiring a ninja for dog walking, landscaping, even trash pickup or pet finding are considered 'D-Rank' missions, while escorting people or being a bodyguard is chosen by the threats the ninja'd face C-Rank is for the biggest threat being common bandits, B-Rank is for ninja enemies and the most difficult jobs are A and S rank, which gives a lot of money to the people who perform them each time.

Jiraiya is in fact the richest ninja we've seen in the manga not only due to his best selling books: Crocodile's plan from One Piece is a more well-thought out version of the H. He plans to use his mercenary organization, Baroque Works, to stage a coup on the country of Alabasta.

However, this is only the first part of his plan, the second part was to use the revolution as a cover to sneak into the palace and find the blueprints for the superweapon Pluton. Not as well-thought out, however, is the Arlong Pirates' money-making scheme. They take over Nami's home island, by and large cutting it off from the rest of the world, and demand a monthly tax from its residents in order for them to keep their lives.

On their first sweep of Nami's village alone, they get roughly 25 million berries, which would indicate that, during the eight years leading up to the story's present, that one little village paid over two billion berries, an incredibly staggering sum.

Given that the island is a small backwater fishing and farming community instead of a bustling port, one has to wonder where on earth that one little village procured all that money from, to say nothing of the other villages spread across the island.

Part of the problem with that is that the relative value of Berries to any real world currency. Given that monetary values in the series are often only portrayed for very-high-value things like Bounties, Aristocrat slave auctions, or the sale of large amounts of treasure, the basics of the One Piece economy are in general hard to derive. Spice and Wolf not only averts this trope, but it's based entirely on Economics, so it would be a disaster if this trope was played straight The comedic Elseworlds book Superman: Superman tries to solve the UK's debt by turning all the coal in the British Isles into diamonds.

Later at a press conference, a Lord tells Superman that because of "basic economic theory", diamonds are now worth less than coal. Not only does this make Superman's stunt useless, but thousands of coal miners have now lost their jobs and there is no coal for people to heat their houses with. Superman a bit of a Ditz in this universe then suggests going into outer space and bring back gold from other planets to give to each familycausing the Lord to shout "You just don't get itdo you Superman?

Useless, overly complicated stuff squee! It was possible to have a well-running economy with four-hours-a-day jobs, but an experiment with Ireland showed that having too much free time had bad results, the population getting bored and excessively using the government-issued drug soma. However the book screws up in assuming that there is infinite amount of raw resources on Earth to be able to support such an inefficient economic system.

The author tried to handwave all this away, claiming the human population is kept artificially low and recycling technology has advanced to unprecedented sophistication. It does helps that the society is a low scale due to having survived many wars and birthrate controlled. They even mentions that they have a bunch of islands to throw unfit people there since the population is just that small. And they can make it smaller if they want since they have total control over birth rates.

Also, at one point one of the characters asks why they don't structure society with smaller lower classes. So they feel it's socially necessary to have inferiors. First, the Prime Minister is inspired to give everyone one of Komori's blankets, so they feel optimistic and will spend stimulus money, and this is shown as working well and helping Japan's economy. However, someone points out that Nozomu has no financial worries because he's a civil servant, and so the P. This completely crashes the economy.

In an episode of Disney's Aladdin: The Series Iago is granted semi- Phenomenal nearly Cosmic powers for the day, with a few provisos After he distributes conjured gemstones freely to the public, the people of Agrabah all practically worship him, until they realize it takes bushels of rubies just to buy bread.

Huey, Dewey, and Louie find a machine that lets them duplicate dollar coins en masse. This episode was loosely based on Carl Barks ' A Financial Fable and The Fabulous Philosopher's Stonewhich are also notable aversions. A fun one, based on Barks' story Tralla Lainvolved a civilization which operated entirely on the honor system being intoxicated and then inundated with bottle caps.

First they were rare, and everybody wanted one. Then they were common and used as currency, then inflated because Launchpad was air-dropping planeloads in order to break the rarity.

The value of the caps fell so quickly, that they were arrested for throwing trash. They eventually got rid of all the bottle caps just to put a stop to the madness. In one episode Huey, Dewey, and Louie wanted a fancy scooter thing, but were not going to get allowance until Saturday, and the price of the Scooter was going to rise on Saturday so they wouldn't be able to buy it.

So they convinced Scrooge it was Saturday. Being the important businessman he is, passing on this notion "it is Saturday" to other powerful people of the world, this small date confusion spread worldwide and brought the entire world's economy to a grinding halt.

Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In a Don Rosa Scrooge McDuck story, The Quest for KalevalaScrooge briefly gets his hand on The Sampoa mythic handmill that can produce infinite amounts of gold. Normally business-savvy Scrooge gets struck by a severe case of gold fever, and starts rolling out tons of gold. In the middle of a storming sea.

The economic implications were left unstudied, since immediate survival quickly becomes a more important matter. Knowing Scrooge, he probably wanted more gold just to swim in.

An Italian Scrooge McDuck comic has him trying to hunt down a second-rate philosopher's stone - it can turn any metal into silver - because he owns a majority of the world's silver mines, and its existence would make silver worth much less presumably, anyone who gets the stone can duplicate it. The Beagle Boys, on the other hand, are merely thrilled at the idea of making silver out of common junk and getting rich selling it, and try to steal it from him.

Donald gets into the world of numismatics after he discovers how precious rare coins can be, and cons Scrooge into exchanging modern money for old from the depths of his hoard to subsequently sell the old pieces for a profit.

Scrooge gets wind of it, and cons Donald back by selling him a whole bag of old coins After learning about numismatics from Donald presumably no relation to the above case and realizing how coins are more valuable the rarer they are, he induces an artificial scarcity by buying up every coin of a certain mintage, and dumping all but one into the deepest part of the ocean, making the remaining one priceless.

It promptly has a run-in with a steamroller, necessitating the main plot of them diving into the ocean to find a replacement, fighting Atlanteans in the process.

In the end, he has the coin valued and starts looking for a buyer A Paul Murry-drawn Mickey Mouse comic has a villain that has discovered a literal mountain made of diamond. This makes him incredibly rich, as long as no one else knows it exists, since he can control the amount he sells. Hence, his villainy consists of seeing to it that no one who has seen his property ever gets away alive. Disturbingly, this sort of artificial scarcity is Truth in Television for how the diamond industry actually works and it was worse under the infamous DeBeers monopoly.

Nodwick averts this when the party meets up with a kobold accountantwho gets them to spare his life in exchange for advice on how to make the most of their treasure.

He introduces them to the idea of inflation, for a start, and suggests they pay more attention to gathering treasures other than gold coins. It is said that transmutation is relatively simple magic, which could allow the Others and specifically the Watches to manufacture money or any other resource. It is said that most non-Watch Others would be severely limited in the degree to which they could do this, whereas the Watches themselves assign minor Others to the task of managing their business holdings to fund themselves.

It's explained that they do this because they don't want to ruin the local economies which, considering that the books are set in Russia, are bad enough as they are.

The useless B-Ark people who crash on prehistoric Earth in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe try to set up an economy using leaves as a currency, but there's so many leaves about that they're instantly devalued. Dumb, but it would work. Three oppressive Dystopias operate with perpetual war economies in Nineteen Eighty Fourwith it being explicitly stated even two on one, none of them can win the war.

This is done to destroy surplus wealth and keep people's standards of living from getting better. The goal isn't to support their economies, but to keep them down. Using war to deliberately destroy wealth may be insane, but it works.

It also theorizes that people could be forced to make very large monuments to use up wealth and keep the standard of living low, but war stirs more passion in citizensand ultimately more love for their leader.

There's also speculation - both in-universe and in the real world - that the "eternal war" was actually just part of the all-encompassing governmental propaganda. A similar problem to Brave New World arises, though such a model requires infinite resources, unless incredibly efficient recycling methods have been developed.

The book handwaves this by saying that even the leaders behind the scheme realize eventually their standard of living will get worse over time as well— they don't mind as long as they are sufficiently ahead of the proletarians. An apparently similar scenario appears in the segment of Katsuhiro Otomo 's Memories entitled Cannon Fodderwhich depicts a day in the life of a city devoted entirely to firing countless cannons at the unseen, possibly fictional "Moving Cities" of an unknown enemy, with the populace kept in line by an authoritarian government utilizing ubiquitous propaganda.

There's at least one real Moving City, the one protagonists live in, and we are shown only a small portion of its works. It is entirely possible for the City to have a functional, if really imbalanced, "garrison economy"; the point of the episode was more about the futility of war in general. Similar to the Nodwick example, in Tales of MU "Delvers" adventurers have one of the highest tax-liabilities in the Imperium, but delving gear is tax-deductible.

This encourages delvers to keep most of their wealth in the form of high-end magic items rather than simply flooding the economy with excess gold. Beyond This Horizon is set in a society where everyone is given the basics for free.

However, they still had money and the economics made sense in context. Though to be fair that's pretty easy: Another of his novels For Us, The Livinghas an extended multi-chapter digression in which the main characters play a game modeling the economy of the time the book was written mid-to-late sbefore using the same game as a general case that they can modify to reach the "ideal" that the USA of the book's setting used, based on the economic theory of Social Credit.

In Pumpkin Scissorswe see the sad state of The Empire after the war they've had, in which there was barely any post-war relief efforts done until the formation of Section 3, and their jobs are difficult one of the characters even find that his superiors were intentionally keeping the cost of commodities up by purchasing them from a province where it is more expensive, and the main character suffers something of a Heroic B.

Let's not even get to all the effort and resources they've put into the Invisible 9, and you could infer them to having a "Destruction Equals Employment" policy going on by the amount of resources the military gets. The show's main message seems to be that Aristocrats Are Evil Alice herself notwithstandingand the Empire's economic hardships were largely an illustration to that thesis. The Discworld novel Making Money does a reasonable job for a comedic fantasy of dealing with the transition from coinage to paper currency, and issues like market liquidity, convertibility, and cost of acceptance.

In the first bookthe Patrician tries to explain to Rincewind why Twoflower spreading gold all over Ankh-Morpork is not the Good Thing everyone else believes.

Rincewind doesn't really get it. It indirectly leads to the entire city being burned to the ground, but he was talking about runaway inflation. He also hints that it would destabilize political relations between Ankh-Morpork and the Agatean Empire.

The "Elmo Saves Christmas" special of Sesame Streetwhen Elmo wishes for every day to be Christmas. After the first few days of this, nearly everyone's parents are broke and the presents are valueless because he has so many of them.

After a year, everyone is permanently out of work, Christmas trees are an endangered species, and Santa is forced to retire. As a way of explaining the Law of Diminishing Utility to pre-schoolers, it ain't half-bad. The Garin Death Ray is a Soviet sci-fi novel in which a Mad Scientist intentionally invokes this trope in a bid to Take Over the World.

He invents a mirror-based laser-like device and uses it to drill a mine shaft deep into the Earth's mantle where, apparently, there is a geological layer composed entirely of gold. He then sets sail for the naturally evil, corrupt, uber-capitalist United Statesstarts selling bars of gold for a dollar apiece to anyone who asks, and soon brings the entire economy to its knees remember, the gold standard was still in use at the time.

It is then up to our Soviet heroes to dodge Frickin' Laser Beams and foil his plot, after which the United States promptly converts to Communism. In MetalocalypseNathan takes over Florida and immediately drives the country into the ground by rationalizing that the best way to solve poor people's problems is to print more money.

Needless to say, Florida's money is made quite worthless. Nathan went on to destroy the state with a hurricane, though, so nature balanced it out. Averted in The Fairly OddParents! Fairies cannot grant wishes for money because it would necessitate either stealing or counterfeiting, and they are not allowed to grant wishes that break the law.

Played with in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle ; Reese is advising Malcolm via earpiece on how to talk to a girl he likes, and has him state that he wishes the government would turn 1 dollar bills into dollar bills so that nobody would be poor. Malcolm rolls his eyes at the idea, but says it anyway. Fortunately for him, the girl is as much an idiot as Reeseand takes the idea as a profound statement of social conscience.

It's set in a world where Jack he of the Beanstalk famehas become lord of the realm on the strength of his gold-egg-laying goose. At the beginning of the story, the goose is found strangled, and a hapless courtier is set to finding out who had committed the seemingly senseless crime of destroying the source of the national wealth Meaning that EVERYONE from King Jack on down had an excellent motive. And then it turns out that the culprit was the one person who had no motive: The submarine adventure simulation SubCulture has a quite well-rounded economy.

You can gather several raw materials like, metal, thorium, or nicotine in the ocean and sell them at the various cities, or buy wares from one city and sell it for a profit to another. Buying raises prices, selling lowers them. In The Limits of Possibility during a quarrel with Yennefer, Geralt mentioned one of the "strange" sides of their world: Isn't it strange that during every dragon hunt, some or other sorcerer strongly associated with the jewelers' guild always hangs around.

And later, when one would think gems must flood the market, they for some reason don't go there, and prices don't fall. The Singularity has arrived! Technology has advanced to the point that practically anyone can have practically anything for practically nothing. In other words, A Wizard Did It - with SCIENCE! Put more charitably, complete automation via advanced AI etc. Bonus points for those cases that deal with the fact that some things are still scarce because of their very nature.

The ability to effectively infinitely replicate any commodity does not mean everyone can have a house just like Fallingwaterthe front row seat to a particular concert, or the authentic, original Honus Wagner tobacco card. Gianni Rodari's story Planet of Christmas Trees features a planet on which all work is done by robots and machines and everyone has access to any resources the want, to the point where entire castles are built just to be smashed by people who need to work off some frustration.

Also It's Always Springevery day is Christmas, and the government has grown unnecessary. The Midas Plague features an unusual situation where there is too much production. People are expected to work less and consume more; and the ratio of possessions to social standing is completely inverted. For some reason, probably comedythe thought of simply reducing production is considered unworkable. The set of novels starting with " The Uglies " by Scott Westerfield had Cities which seemed to be this.

We find out later in the first novel this is true, but not solely because of the highly advanced technology the society has.

In fact, the last novel of the series called "The Extras" deals very well with the fallout when one of the Pretties' "enhancements" is fixed with the Brain Rain. Said change caused a huge, permanent sea-change that required the society to have a type of currency based on reputation and work you do to limit resource usage. Robert Anton Wilson's Schroedinger's Cat trilogy studies a number of Alternate Universesincluding a Utopian one, where a manual laborer who invents a way to automatize his work will get a high standard of living for lifetime, and everybody else in the same business gets a comfortable one, as machines multiply the production rates, allowing a part of the surplus to be used this way, since capitalism requires consumers in order to function.

The system has its problems to a careful reader - one would imagine that people would cry foul when major parts of the formerly working class populace get free lunch without doing anything, while others continue to toil at least until someone in their ranks manages to mechanize that particular industry, as well.

Still, the people who have jobs that can't be automatized are depicted as the lucky ones, since permanent vacation isn't all that it's cut out to be, and as a result adult education flourishes. John Ringo 's Council Wars series applies before the war.

Society and Technology have made it so that everyone gets a ration of power each day, more than enough to provide for a comfortable lifestyle. There is a small scale economy in the background, with some luxury goods produced and traded, but it's hardly essential to the setting. This lasts perhaps pages into the book, before things go straight to hell.

Nearly everything they use is created by fabbers which are run by AIs and use only raw materials or can be supplied with old scrap and He 3 to run. The only scarcity in their economy is helium3 yet the high unemployment is repeatedly cited as evidence that the Glatun are headed towards disaster. To add to the oddness humanity eventually builds a He 3 mine that is said to produce so much it could power the entire galactic arm.

The Eldar in Warhammer 40, used to have an economy like this. Their technology had advanced to the point where all work could be done by machines and everything necessary could be easily produced, eliminating scarcity and the need for labor.

It didn't end well, as their society eventually slipped into decadence and resulted in the creation of the Chaos God of Squickannihilating the majority of the Eldar in the process. This was also implied for much of humanity during the Dark Age of Technology, which coincided with the latter years of Eldar supremacy. Using Standard Template Constructs, it was possible to build almost anything from local materials, from basic farming equipment and habitats, to highly sophisticated feats of engineering like tapping magma for industry and power generation.

This also included sophisticated but flawed artificial intelligenceswhich later rebelled. People who live in the civilized empires of Orion's Arm can easily go their entire lives without ever having to work, Archailects can provide anything they need and much of what they want for free.

The most common professions are those concerned with raising the next generation, either through parenting or by altering non-sentient species so that they become intelligent enough to join galactic society. The NoCoZo is the biggest exception, being dominated by a number of Mega Corp. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: Cory Doctorow 's Bitchun Society has eliminated scarcity by way of free energy and universal assemblers and death by way of brain uploading and cloning.

Exchanges of the remaining scarce goods those that require human labor, especially human creativity are mediated by "Whuffie", which is a digitally-compiled estimate of your reputation in the eyes of the whole world.

Charles Stross enjoys working with post-scarcity societies; Accelerando chronicles the creation of one straight through the singularity. Protagonist Manfred Macx is one of the first people on Earth to realize that in such a world the best way to get truly rich is to help other people achieve great goals and become rich.

In Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise the most valuable resource in the universe are the entangled quantum dots that enable faster-than-light communication and which have to be transported slower than light. After that the most valuable things are information and creativity. There are particularly odd things such as the market for reputation in Accelerando A person with a valuable reputation is someone worth investing in - their work will give you back valuable ideas, access to valuable resources, or simple entertainment.

It's like an elaborate amalgam of a stock market, venture capitalism, and one's social media followers. Accelerando also mentions "Economics 2. It apparently isn't possible to understand nor engage in Economics 2. It's somewhat implied that the superintelligences are trading in lesser intelligences for control of creativity and novelty, but the characters observe from indirect contact with the remnants of other post-Singularity societies that they end up autocannibalizing as the superintelligences use and use up one another in their ever-more-complex economic interactions.

Antaeus Rising takes place in a world where Nano Machines can create anything from dirt, and created a post-scarcity world where money is no longer used. The villains consist of The Remnant of the old guard, seeking to tear down this system and reinstate scarcity so they can reclaim their old power and influence.

Strugatsky Brothers ' Noon Universe has a classical post-scarcity society which they explicitly called communism. That gave them all kinds of trouble with the authorities, as their take on what communism should look like decentralized, technology focused was radically different from the party line.

Similar elements were actually common with most Soviet Sci-Fi indeed, it was actually required that writers depict the future as being communist, because the government thought it would "inevitably" be the case but they fleshed it out to such an extent that it unnerved censors.

Many Lusanians long for the "simpler life" others have.

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In Eclipse Phase habitats operating under a "New" economy don't use money, instead most items are produced by public nanofabricators that are supplied with raw materials by robot miners, and everyone who contributes a few hours of "community service" each week is allotted enough resources to feed six people each day. Anything that can't be nanofabbed or requires more resources than a person is allotted services, implants, spaceships, earth relics The Titanian Commonwealth has a variant where the government quantifies people's economic output as "kroners" that are invested in microcorps which do anything that nanofabs can't and give their employees rep.

There are also habitats with "Old" economies that ban nanofabricators and "Transitional" economies that have money and public nanofabricators which can only be used to produce goods without electronics or rare elements.

To the Stars has this with Earth, with replicators being commonplace, although there are 'allocs' for luxury items like non-synthesized restaurant food or berths on space-going vessels. Averted, however, on the other planets in humanity's empire, which still use a capitalist system. The main character, from Earth, is therefore quite confused when deployed to one of these planets and is bombarded by things called 'advertisements'.

To the fanfic's credit, it's mentioned that the twenty-year-and-still going war is causing resources to be drained faster, resulting in an economic shift back towards a capitalist model. Professions which used to be performed for free pre-war are beginning to ask for donations, and students are re-thinking their career choices when they could previously chase whatever dream they wanted regardless of productivity. This is understandably troubling for many Earthborn who are unused to the idea of scarcity, especially for the basics.

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