Ok, so the PhDs at Bloomberg tell their readership not to fund this boondoggle of a space adventure, but instead to ... buy up stock certificates with debt inst

Ok, so the PhDs at Bloomberg tell their readership not to fund this boondoggle of a space adventure, but instead to ... buy up stock certificates with debt instruments or some such .... But Wall Street and the Fed (Bloomberg's audience) basically fund every moonshot these days (directly or indirectly) and either they or Congress get into an asteroid race, spends millions/billions/trillions of dollars but fail to recover any more marketable quantities of physical gold for Earth's surface than would an expedition to the center of the Earth (where there's also gold!) ... and instead sell certificates representing ownership shares of the asteroid, which initially trade at pairity with physical Earth-surface metal, but as it becomes clearer that this is an IOU nothing printed based on the most optimistic projections of what is contained in the space rock (and then there are the competing claims of multiple expeditions!), the paper declines precipitously in value and once again demonstrates that economic theory is fine and good, but unmoored from the discipline provided by tangible backing of gold, oil, or whatever, a system of currency and credit like ours predicably generates worthless pieces of paper from huge misallocations of resources and waste.