Stuck in the Mud

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit” (Harry Truman). Much of the creation of a business is in the packaging. The property rights and the ability to secure barriers to monetise the idea. The legal form. The relationships. The financing. The complex system that eventually makes things happen requires some sort of division of the pie, and attribution of where the value is added (even if this is nearly impossible). The beauty of a market for price discovery is we can fudge a price. Price isn’t value. It is a way of saying “this is a mess (too complicated to be precise), but I am happy, are you happy?”. It is a clearing mechanism. There are lots of places where we can get stuck in the mud trying to allocate credit. We get comfort in numbers. They give the illusion of precision. Money isn’t precise. It isn’t even a thing. Money is just an imprecise lubricant to clear things that get stuck. It’s in the complex web of fundamentals underneath where the amazing things are accomplished. Beyond credit.