>Would you agree that a hypothetical extremely communist society is automatically allocating capital correctly?
no, and I dont see how that follows at all. I think the opposite is more likely true due to the lack of markets. End stage communism is stateless (but that is a tangent).
If you have a single investor/state and law says exactly where the money goes, I would say that low capital efficiency is a policy failure, not a failure of the market to allocate.
I think this comes down to confusion of what a market is. A market has private buyers and sellers making exchange.
I grant that you could have a poor capital allocation by a government. I think the part that I vehemently disagree with is calling that a "market misallocation".
I suppose we're done here then, we don't agree on the terminology and there isn't much to be done.
It isn't important but if you can point at large community who uses capital allocation in that sense I'd be interested to know it. It seems like a weird usage to me because it would seem to imply that a fully (or even heavily) planned economy either doesn't have capital or don't allocate it; both flawed implications.
> I think the part that I vehemently disagree with is calling that a "market misallocation".
I didn't. I've been quite specifically talking about US government policy causing capital misallocations. The US bankers are generally very keen on the idea of getting richer and the US wouldn't have the sort of real metric stagnation it has if the policy settings weren't visibly stupid. Indeed, even then the market has attempted to reset the situation multiple times (politically interesting examples are '07, introducing Bitcoin and SVB's failure) and generally been stymied by active interventions to keep incompetent investors wealthy.
OK, I have been operating under the assumption that the capital allocation under debate was with respect to private markets because we started with the pricing of publicly traded stock pricing. Looking through the sequencing, I do note that you didn't specifically call out markets in your comments, and it was others invoking the idea of market failure of some sort.
It seems like I do agree with your assessment of government policy, but I still dont get where you were going with the communist thing.
no, and I dont see how that follows at all. I think the opposite is more likely true due to the lack of markets. End stage communism is stateless (but that is a tangent).
If you have a single investor/state and law says exactly where the money goes, I would say that low capital efficiency is a policy failure, not a failure of the market to allocate.
I think this comes down to confusion of what a market is. A market has private buyers and sellers making exchange.
I grant that you could have a poor capital allocation by a government. I think the part that I vehemently disagree with is calling that a "market misallocation".