Excerpt from Bubble, Bubble, How Much Financial Markets as Agents of Capitalist Development and Capitalist Crises the Case of Futures and Options Markets It has become quite common in recent years for left and liberal economists to denounce developments in the financial sphere. The growth in transactions occuring on the options and futures exchanges and the recent wave of mergers of unprecedented size are both the subject of sharp criticism and polemic from the left. The financial sector is represented in many an analysis as perilously ballooning. L'aper transactions and more paper transactions are executed in the markets of Wall Street, all to the simple end of profit for some speculators but to no visible, functional, valuable end for the productive economy as a whole. This financial bubble is treated by some as a cause and by others as a concomitant symptom of industrial decline in the United States. The seemingly fantastic and imposing escalation of financial variables portend, according to this common wisdom, their own inevitable collapse-the burst of the financial bubble-with a consequently negative impact on the sphere of real industrial production as well. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.