Joan Robinson (1903 – 1983)
British post-Keynesian economist who made many contributions to economic theory.
But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.
It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand.
When a large part of the market for British textiles was in the colonies, a fall in the price of tea and cocoa caused unemployment in Lancashire.
At any moment there is certainly not balanced trade between the various areas of the habitable globe that happens to be under seperate national governments — there is an ever-changing pattern of deficits and surpluses.