High Return Investments

Free market

A free-market (free-trade or neo-liberal) economy is an idealized form of a
market economy in which buyers and sellers are permitted to carry out
transactions based on mutual agreement on price without government
intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies, regulation, or government
ownership of goods or services. The free market is considered the mainstay
of ideologies such as minarchism and libertarianism and Western definitions
of capitalism. It is anathema to communism and some variants of socialism,
as defined in the West, although most variants of socialism seek to mitigate
what they see as the problems of an unrestrained free market.

In reality there are no totally free or ideal markets in operation. Lack of
perfect knowledge, monopolistic practices, cartels, taxes and government
regulation bias the equilibrium points of most large markets in existence
today. Participants engage in information bias practices such as insider
trading and price fixing. Some believe that the notion of a free market is
inherently inachievable because they believe that governments are
fundamentally involved in markets through the creation and enforcement of
property rights. Others argue that the concept of property comes from
natural law and therefore it is incorrect to see governments as creating markets.

In the ideal free market, the law of supply and demand functions,
influencing prices toward an equilibrium that balances the demands for the
products against the supplies. At these equilibrium prices, the market
distributes the products to the purchasers according to each purchaser's use
(or utility) for each product and within the relative limits of each buyer's
purchasing power. In the limited mathematical ideal market this distribution
of products is Pareto Optimal (see Pareto efficiency), meaning that no
purchaser could have their purchasing limits filled in a way more useful to
them without reducing the usefulness of some other purchaser's bundle of
products. This type of optimality doesn't necessarily have anything to say
about the distribution of purchasing power itself (which is often an input
to the mathematical ideal market) - the optimality generally refers to the
distribution of products given the pre-existing purchasing power of the
purchasers. The necessary components for the functioning of such a free
market include no artificial price pressures from taxes, subsidies, tariffs,
or government regulation, perfect (or at a minimum, equivalent) knowledge
about the value of the goods, geographic availablity of goods to all people,
and no artificial monopolies or other forms of economic coercion on the part
of the actors.

The distribution of purchasing power in an economy depends to a large extent
on the Labor market and the Financial markets, but also on other things such
as family relationships, inheritance, gifts and so on. The ideal free market
does not explain particularly well the performance of many real markets such
as the Labor market, or Financial markets. It explains better the markets
for consumers products.

The economic and political application of the concept of the ideal free
market is known, primarily by detractors, as neoliberalism.

Investment FreshNews:

Personal Finance Daily: The week's 10 best Personal Finance stories: Sept. 1-5 (Market Watch)
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:25:14 GMT
In case you missed them, here are the top 10 Personal Finance stories from MarketWatch for the week of Sept. 1-5:

Citigroup: The Bad Boy of Finance (Washington Post)
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:12:04 GMT
Citigroup has looked like an octopus in a minefield lately. The world's largest bank measured by revenues, Citigroup (symbol C ) is involved in every aspect of finance you could name -- and appears to have made big mistakes in most of them. The company has written off and lost $53.6 billion through the credit crunch so far, which is more than any other bank or broker.

Heat on car finance firm (The New Zealand Herald)
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:53:07 GMT
A second-hand car finance firm that collapsed owing $25 million to investors is the subject of an official inquiry.

Author ready to amend article on finance panel (Gloucester Daily Times)
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:22:13 GMT
ROCKPORT and mdash; The author of the only petition article appearing on the fall Town Meeting warrant says he'll amend his proposal from the podium Monday night. As written, the Article J petition, penned by Charles Francis, calls for a bylaw change in the appointment authority for the Finance Committee from selectmen to the moderator. After hearing concerns from many, including Town Moderator ...

China's sudden collapse: corruption, finance, trade, outsourcing, politics, law, society (cmi valparaíso)
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:01:37 GMT
What is really inside Chinese government and society? Is China about to go burst or rising higher? Is a runaway government corruption destroying Chinese economy and peace? What is really behind Chinese finance, politics, trade, politics and society?

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