[Asclepius]

But there IS a way to measure financial services sold.

I admire your steadfast optimism, I suppose. But no, alas, there really isn't, or at least not a way that economists and market analysts agree on, and our import-export data fails to account for it. Manufacturing is easy. Simple double entry book keeping will suffice to relate incomes and outflows and costs and liabilities and assets etc. But how do you quantify an asset like a skilled CPA who manages a joint-trust and trades derivatives? Answer: you can't.

Expertise and information still await the rise of a Marx or an Adam Smith of the information age who will show us how to understand them, account for them, provide us with a theory to explain or predict their behaviors etc., etc. What about you? Are you up to the challenge? Back to school with you! Our services sector needs you. Develop a theory or a suite of operational concepts to help show us the way.

[jammer]

Lol. Thanks, but I must decline. I'm too old, and, more importantly, I probably don't have what it takes to formulate the theory. Now, if we were to talk about the value of a dollar spent by government versus a private dollar spent (in terms other than velocity and in terms other than the hackneyed Samuelson "industrial pipe" diagram), I might want to do that!

Is the skilled CPA an asset or a unit of labor, albeit very "valuable?" Until his/her management produces wealth, the asset, it seems to me, is worth nothing. Rao's (and I suppose others by now) valuation of assets using immediate, intermediate, and final cash flows, rather than CAPM is persuasive to me that the "asset's" value is zero. When it rises, the value can be computed from the return. But, I am a neophyte and am sure that I am too simplistic.