So are all assets. It's one of the quirks of capitalism that markets remain efficient only to the extent that people believe that they're inefficient, and liqu

So are all assets. It's one of the quirks of capitalism that markets remain efficient only to the extent that people believe that they're inefficient, and liquid only to the extent that people are misinformed about an asset's value. To see why, imagine a perfectly efficient asset market with perfect information, where the goal of every participant is to maximize their financial returns. In such a market, all participants know everything that all other participants do, they know that all other participants know everything they do, and they can transact instantaneously without cost. Prices in this market converge instantly upon the "true" value, which can be agreed upon by all market partipants because of their omniscience. Such a market has zero liquidity. Why would anyone transact if they know that a security already has the correct value? For there to be profit potential, the person who sells to you must be misinformed about the security's true value, which contradicts the assumption of omniscience. The interesting thing is that the more market participants believe in the market's efficiency, the more inefficient it becomes. With little incentive to do their own research (why bother, when the current price reflects more information than they could possibly amass?), the underlying fundamental value of the asset can drift further from the consensus price without anyone noticing. This increases the profit potential for people who assume that they know better than everyone else. Eventually, a few of them get rich, the consensus breaks down, lots of people lose their shirts, and the market becomes efficient again. The result is the business cycle. Periods where people believe in the market's efficiency are bubbles (when the consensus price is above the true value) and panics (when the consensus price is below the true value). Periods when they don't are crises, where the prevailing momentum swings but this change in opinion is unevenly distributed. Lots of things fundamental to the modern world are unstable. The whole concept of a financial asset is one of them. I can think of a number of individual industries that have an unstable dynamic, but I'm not going to name them because I believe there's profit potential in them. Public opinion is yet another one.