ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

My name’s Nathan Matson, I’m a Senior in Biochem, minoring in both Microbiology and Chemistry, from Redmond area.

Money is a means to an end, a convenient intermediate in the exchange of goods and services.  In lieu of directly bartering, a consumer can essentially just hand over an IOU which the seller can then trade to someone else.  Even though money in this day and age is still essentially just an IOU, people still place value in it since it has become the basis of society and can be used to purchase basically anything anyone could want.

Economy is a bit trickier to define, even though the definition can be simplified to just the flow of money through society.  While the major component of economy is the flow of money, the values of goods and services are determined through many different factors, chiefly supply and demand in the US economy.

However unlike in the past, investment and speculation seem to have taken control of the world’s economy, where money is channeled into certain ventures that seem to be productive, and in turn the value of money changes as the players either produce more or develop new and exciting ways of doing things.  I thought the idea that value is based on how much people think a company or country will be worth in the future was interesting take on the problem of why money is valuable.