How is investment defined as an economic concept




















An investment bank provides a variety of services to individuals and businesses, including many services that are designed to assist individuals and businesses in the process of increasing their wealth. Investment banking may also refer to a specific division of banking related to the creation of capital for other companies, governments, and other entities.

Investment banks underwrite new debt and equity securities for all types of corporations, aid in the sale of securities , and help to facilitate mergers and acquisitions , reorganizations, and broker trades for both institutions and private investors. Investment banks may also provide guidance to companies who are considering issuing shares publicly for the first time, such as with an initial public offering IPO. Speculation is a distinct activity from investing.

Investing involves the purchase of assets with the intent of holding them for the long term, while speculation involves attempting to capitalize on market inefficiencies for short-term profit. Ownership is generally not a goal of speculators, while investors often look to build the number of assets in their portfolios over time. Although speculators are often making informed decisions, speculation cannot usually be categorized as traditional investing. Speculation is generally considered a higher risk activity than traditional investing although this can vary depending on the type of investment involved.

Some experts compare speculation to gambling, but the veracity of this analogy may be a matter of personal opinion. In an investment, you are providing some individual or entity with funds to be put to work growing a business, starting new projects, or maintaining day-to-day revenue generation. Investments, while they can be risky, have a positive expected return. Gambles, on the other hand, are based on chance and not putting money to work. Gambles are highly risky and also have a negative expected return in most cases e.

Not really. An investment is typically a long-term commitment, where the payoff from putting that money to work can take several years. Investments are typically made only after due diligence and proper analysis have been undertaken to understand the risks and benefits that could unfold. Speculation, on the other hand, is a pure directional bet on the price of something, and often for the short-term. Most ordinary individuals can easily make investments in stocks, bonds, and CDs.

With stocks, you are investing in the equity of a company, which means you invest in some residual claim to a company's future profit flows and often gain voting rights based on the number of shares owned to give your voice to the direction of the company.

Bonds and CDs are debt investments, where the borrower puts that money to use in a pursuit that is expected to bring in cash flows greater than the interest owed to the investors. As mentioned, investing is putting money to work in order to grow it. When you invest in stocks or bonds, you are putting that capital to work under the supervision of a firm and its management team.

Cash, on the other hand, will not grow, and may very well lose buying power over time due to inflation. Put simply, without investment, companies would not be able to raise the capital needed to grow the economy.

Financial Statements. Portfolio Management. Retirement Savings Accounts. Investing Essentials. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. In a purely agrarian society, early humans had to choose how much grain to eat after the harvest and how much to save for future planting.

The latter was investment. In a more modern society, we allocate our productive capacity to producing pure consumer goods such as hamburgers and hot dogs, and investment goods such as semiconductor foundries. If we create one dollar worth of hamburgers today, then our gross national product is higher by one dollar. If we create one dollar worth of semiconductor foundry today, gross national product is higher by one dollar, but it will also be higher next year because the foundry will still produce computer chips long after the hamburger has disappeared.

This is how investment leads to economic growth. Without it, human progress would halt. Investment need not always take the form of a privately owned physical product. The most common example of nonphysical investment is investment in human capital. When a student chooses study over leisure, that student has invested in his own future just as surely as the factory owner who has purchased machines. Investment theory just as easily applies to this decision. Pharmaceutical products that establish heightened well-being can also be thought of as investments that reap higher future productivity.

Moreover, government also invests. The literature discussed below focuses on the study of physical capital purchases, but the analysis is more widely applicable. In an economy that is closed to the outside world, investment can come only from the forgone consumption—the saving —of private individuals, private firms, or government.

This method of financing investment has been very important in the United States. The industrial base of the United States in the nineteenth century—railroads, factories, and so on—was built on foreign finance, especially from Britain. More recently, the United States has repeatedly posted significant investment growth and very low savings. However, when investment is funded from outside, some of the future returns to capital are passed outside as well.

Over time, then, a country that relies exclusively on foreign financing of investment may find that it has very little capital income with which to finance future consumption.

Accordingly, the source of investment finance is an important concern. If it is financed by domestic saving, then future returns stay at home.

If it is financed by foreign saving, then future returns go abroad, and the country is less wealthy than otherwise. The theory of investment dates back to the giants of economics. In addition, investment was one of the first variables studied with modern empirical techniques. Already in , Albert Aftalion noted that investment tended to move with the business cycle. Many authors, including Nobel laureate trygve haavelmo , contributed to the advance of the investment literature after the war.

Dale Jorgenson published a highly influential synthesis of this and earlier work in His neoclassical theory of investment has withstood the test of time because it allows policy analysts to predict how changes in government policy affect investment. In addition, the theory is intuitively appealing and is an essential tool for any economist. Here is a brief sketch. Suppose you run a firm and are deciding whether to purchase a machine.

What should affect your decision? The first observation is that you should purchase the machine if doing so will increase your profits. For that to happen, the revenue you earn from the machine should at least be equal to the costs. On the revenue side, the calculation is easy. If, for example, the machine will produce one thousand donuts and you can sell them at ten cents apiece, then you know, after subtracting the noncapital costs such as flour, exactly how much extra revenue the machine will produce.

But what costs are associated with the machine? Suppose the machine lasts forever, so you do not have to worry about wear and tear. If you decide not to buy the machine, then you can put the money in the bank and earn interest. What Is Adverse Selection? Adverse selection is a term that describes the presence of unequal information between buyers and sellers, distorting the market and creating conditions that can lead to an economic collapse.

It develops Explaining The K-Shaped Economic Recovery from Covid A K-shaped recovery exists post-recession where various segments of the economy recover at their own rates or levels, as opposed to a uniform recovery where each industry takes the same Both on paper and in real life, there is a solid relationship between economics, public choice, and politics.

The economy is one of the major political arenas after all.



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