Brad DeLong has an impressively clear (although, or perhaps because, a bit technical) piece on risk appetite and fundamental values of assets . I feel I should respond to it, but it's such a tour de force of clear and explicit assumptions, rigorous logic and thunderous conclusions that I feel I barely can. I particularly loved this statement for pure bloody-minded literalism (that's a good thing, by the way): The fundamental values of asset prices are the money-metric values that the costate variables associated with the commodities would have in some reasonable utilitarian central-planning social-welfare-maximization exercise under reasonable utilitarian preferences. However, here is what comes to mind: Given that asset prices rarely approach the values Brad ascribes to them, could this be because there is competition for the limited amount of savings capital available in the world? If I, as a productively investing business, want to get access to some of it, I probably need t
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