The prices of assets, such as land and buildings, productive equipment, and securities. As assets can be traded, their present prices are strongly influenced by expectations about their future prices, and by the interest rate at which future values are discounted. As stocks of assets are very large compared to any one period’s new asset creation, asset prices are anchored much less firmly than goods prices to costs of production. It is common for asset prices to vary widely over quite short time periods; the large differences between the maximum and minimum prices of individual shares reported within any one year is a typical observation.