Functions of Financial Markets
- Intermediary Functions: The intermediary functions of a financial markets include the following:
- Transfer of Resources: Financial market facilitate the transfer of real economic resources from lenders to ultimate borrowers.
- Enhancing income: Financial markets allow lenders to earn interest or dividend on their surplus invisible funds, thus contributing to the enhancement of the individual and the national income.
- Productive usage: Financial market allow for the productive use of the funds borrowed. The enhancing the income and the gross national production.
- Capital Formation: Financial market provide a channel through which new savings flow to aid capital formation of a country.
- Price determination: Financial markets allow for the determination of price of the traded financial assets through the interaction of buyers and sellers. They provide a sign for the allocation of funds in the economy based on the demand and supply through the mechanism called price discovery process.
- Sale Mechanism: Financial markers provide a mechanism for selling of a financial asset by an investor so as to offer the benefit of marketability and liquidity of such assets.
- Information: The activities of the participants in the financial market result in the generation and the consequent dissemination of information to the various segments of the market. So as to reduce the cost of transaction of financial assets.
- Financial Functions
- Providing the borrower with funds so as to enable them to carry out their investment plans.
- Providing the lenders with earning assets so as to enable them to earn wealth by deploying the assets in production debentures.
- Providing liquidity in the market so as to facilitate trading of funds.
Read more about this topic: Financial Market
Famous quotes containing the words functions, financial and/or markets:
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)