Far more important to the world’s economies than the stock markets are wage and salary incomes and other non-financial sources of livelihood such as the economic value of our homes and apartments. That is where the bulk of our wealth is found.(Schiller, 2003: 9)

Fancy investing in a security whose payoff depends on how much beer is sold in British pubs? How about a bond to be paid by collections of overdue parking fines in New York City? If you’d prefer, you can purchase the rights to a slice of the revenues from old Italian films, or the amounts raised by selling executive suites in Denver’s new stadium, or the royalties earned by pop stars such as David Bowie and Rod Stewart. There is barely a cash flow anywhere, it seems, that cannot be reassembled into a bond-like security that the most conservative of investors might buy.(The Economist, 1998)