alt Hacker NewsHas a competent economist modeled the circularity of these deals ? [ numerically or analytically ]
It seems a healthy economy has a lot of wide circularity .. money circulating is a good thing, a result of a functioning market, tracking the flow of real goods / services. But large corps circulating paper 'self-deals' or debt-swaps seems like a bad thing - a creative accounting practice designed to pump up their stock price/valuation.
How can we _quantify_ the difference ? I guess it would need to match the cash / debt flows against the movement of actual goods and services ??
Not an economist, feel free to weigh in, suggest links.
you'd need to look at prior work associated with the Dot com boom and Enron. Economists rarely look into today's actual activity because America makes it nigh impossible to actually understand who owns what around the fringes; contracts arn't required to be publically disclosed and a bunch of other dark interests make it impossible to really know.
MLMs exist in the same murky waters and tread the same ephermal economics by pushing useless product but hiring people to hire people to hire people, etc.