Man is a social animal. The 19th-century sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel argued that trade and exchange is “one of the purest and most primitive forms of human socialization.” Last month, while travelling through remote parts of West Timor, in Indonesia, I was able to study first-hand how rural markets operate. I could not help wondering why so-called primitive markets such as these work so well when complex financial markets can be so dysfunctional?

Rural markets in East Timor are wonders of trade. Men and women in tribal costumes converge on different villages on different days of the week. Everyone knows when to go to which village for these markets, which typically start at dawn ― when produce is fresh ― and often finish by 11 a.m. Economists would surely call this scene of bustling rural commerce a “concentration of liquidity.”

As the late Stanford economist John McMillan argued, the market is a human construction ― a tool. The market has features to make it work smoothly: mechanisms to organize buying and selling; channels for information flow; laws that define property rights, and self-regulating rules that govern behavior.

Most rural markets are much more complex than they appear. They sell everything needed for daily life and have their own hierarchies. The stalls of wealthier, established traders are sheltered and in the best locations, while poorer traders just spread their wares on the ground. Specialization is evident even in this basic setting ― there are designated places to buy textiles, fresh meat or fish, vegetables or household goods. These markets also function efficiently as information exchanges. Prices differ depending on who you are and what you know. Tourists pay more because they do not know the local language or rules, while locals bargain vigorously.

In these basic markets, you can observe the entire range of business evolution, from simple production to wholesaling and final sale. Everything is designed for convenience and to reduce transaction costs. For instance, there are no roadside petrol pumps. Instead, petrol is sold in small bottles because the most common transport are motorbike taxis which carry as many as three passengers ― plus the occasional precarious chicken or bag of rice.

The permeation of technologies like mobile phones and the Internet even into these remote rural areas has accelerated the speed at which information travels through these markets. This means even lower transaction costs between businesses, between consumers, and from businesses to consumers. In some instances, use of websites like eBay and Alibaba has eliminated geographical space by allowing transactions in such markets to be done online.

With technology ending the isolation of rural markets and linking them to global markets, the production and marketing game is changing beyond recognition. A similar phenomenon occurred in the airline industry. Budget airlines use the Internet to sell forward excess capacity at below average cost, thus filling their planes to capacity and maximizing profits. This created a new market because, before, many people could not afford to fly.

You see the effect of high transportation costs clearly in rural markets. Here, locally produced goods are ludicrously cheap, but imported good are very expensive.

The study of modern, sophisticated supply chains enables us to appreciate the fact that producers do not necessarily make most of their money in the product-to-consumer chain. The rule of thumb is that if a product costs $1 to make, the distribution and transportation costs may account for $3 of the $4 final sale price to the consumer. Common conceptions of innovation still focus largely on creating new products, whereas services or process innovation are probably much more profitable and add more value than is generally understood.

To illustrate, the global trade regime still has a “hardware” focus, concentrating on physical trade rather than the more complex and less measured services trade. Apple innovated not in manufacturing, but in design and lifestyle. This means that they can sell a product at much higher prices than their competitors. Once they have captured a market, value creation comes from downloading new apps for the iPhone and iPad.

Financial services have emerged as one of the most profitable businesses, certainly until the last financial crisis. For a time before the 2007 crisis, the return on capital in the financial sector was 20 percent per annum, significantly higher than for manufacturing and other real sector businesses.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know there were two major reasons for the large profits in finance. The first is that the physical cost of creation of a financial derivative is almost zero, as it is an abstract product of its creator’s imagination. For many, the reason to buy a derivative is to hedge and reduce risk. If a buyer believes that the hedge is useful, which it can be under specific circumstances, then he or she will be willing to pay a premium for that hedge. A second reason is leverage. The greater the leverage, the larger the profits are for both lender and borrower. But there is a catch ― it adds systemic risk to the entire market and can be fatal to the over-leveraged borrower.

The FX Accumulator is a good example. It is a financial product that looks and feels like a wonderful foreign exchange hedge that yields good profits for the speculator. However, many were not aware that at certain price levels, the amount of margin called by the lender could be greater than the total assets held by the speculator. Thus, what appears to be a “safe” hedge can turn out to be toxic, particularly when markets are volatile.

This raises the question whether financial markets have evolved beyond the limits of social safety. University of Southampton professor Richard Werner is one of the first to point out that there are two aspects of credit creation ― one that contributes to real value creation and one that does not. Financial markets have evolved into highly complex systems that consumers, financial experts or regulators do not fully understand. Increasingly, they contribute less to social utility and become systemically fragile.

As McMillan presciently pointed out, “markets are not miraculous. There are problems they cannot address. Left to themselves, markets can fail. Viewed as tools, markets need to be neither revered nor reviled ― just allowed to operate where they are useful.”

Rural markets arise from communities that have organized their commerce in such a way that reinforces social utility and stability. The Holy Grail of financial theory and practice in the world’s advanced economies is to identify at what level of complexity financial markets exceed the limits of social stability.

By Andrew Sheng

Andrew Sheng is president of Fung Global Institute. ― Ed.

(Asia News Network)