Speculation trades on imaginary goods severed from material production

Evidence

In those early days of speculative fever, brokers could see and smell the goods (underlying assets) whose prices they were speculating on. Yet even during that time, traders were selling wheat that had not yet been grown, livestock that had not yet been (and likely never would be) produced. No material commodities were exchanging hands in what were essentially “fictitious dealings.” The distance between the world of trading and the realities of agriculture and farming was growing fast in the pits. Market observers were soon wondering, “Was the practice of setting off a form of productive financial speculation with real benefits for society or were dealers playing with ‘imagined differences’ in their own minds—engaging in an unproductive form of gambling?” (Levy 2006, 245–46). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 55

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: tracing the moment making things up became economically legitimate — from trading ‘imagined differences’ in 1870s wheat to fictional claims in politics and self-presentation today.
• XREF: connects to: The cinema analogy splits a product’s exchange value from its experienced value — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 67; Grain elevator storage physically disentangled grain from its grower for futures trading — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 71