Chapter Six
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have been collected can also be exchanged and this is illustrated by the
following passage where business organizations and financial institutions
are conceptualized as people sharing goods:
The financial system makes it possible for surplus and deficit economic
units to come together, exchanging funds for securities, to their mutual
benefit. When funds flow from surplus economic units to a financial
institution to a deficit economic unit, the process is known as
intermediation. The financial institution acts as an intermediary between
the two economic units (Gallagher and Andrew 2007: 41).The word yield, in the language of financial management and finance
in general, is defined as the annual net income from an investment
expressed as a percentage of its original cost. Yield is thus a measure of
investment return or productivity that distinguishes between the capital
invested and its income. Both yield and return are used in a similar
meaning (e.g. investment returns, return on investment, to generate a
return). They imply the idea of ‘giving back’ an increased amount of
money after a certain period of time. The return is thus simply an
investment’s yield in any one annualized period or in comparison to
benchmarks (Patterson 2011a: 11). The idea of ‘manipulating tokens’ is
also well visible in other financial management terms such as turnover,
portfolio, profit maximalization, cost reduction, value added, financial
gains, investment diversification. Notice that, for instance, investment
diversification is often presented as a rule which says that all your eggs
should never be put into one basket. This conceptualization is shown in
Picture 1.
Picture 1. The traditional theory of investment diversification “don’t put your eggs
in one basket”. Photo courtesy of http://www.centerfinplan.com