The issue focused on a paper by David Hemenway and Jason Sumida at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which showed that some financial markets have now lost their ability to identify true goods and services that are sold for real money. Instead, they have become perfect markets for trading financial instruments. 
 
 They looked at a range of economic indicators, including real gross domestic product (GDP), growth in real wages and prices of goods and services, and interest rates. They found that this seems to be because a certain sort of financial instrument has become so