Previous
Malt
The market price of a good, service, or commodity is the price that people actually pay for it at a specific time and place. Market prices gravitate toward natural prices over time, but often diverge wildly from them in the short term, depending on shifts in supply, demand, and market competitiveness.
Get the entire The Wealth of Nations LitChart as a printable PDF.
Market Price Term Timeline in The Wealth of Nations
The timeline below shows where the term Market Price appears in The Wealth of Nations. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book 1, Chapter 4
...show what determines commodities’ real price (or exchange-value), what makes up this price, and why market prices sometimes rise above or sink below it.
(full context)
Book 1, Chapter 7
...live off rents and laborers off wages.) Due to differences in supply and demand, the market price of commodities often fluctuates above or below the natural price. Specifically, the market price depends...
(full context)
...the buyers will compete for the commodity by offering higher prices, and so the commodity’s market price will rise. But when supply exceeds effectual demand, suppliers will become willing to sell their...
(full context)
Even though market prices naturally gravitate towards natural prices, sometimes they can stay far above natural prices, for a...
(full context)
In contrast, market prices don’t usually stay below natural prices for a long time. When a commodity’s market price...
(full context)
Book 1, Chapter 11
...but they are wrong for three reasons. First, they mistake historic silver-denominated grain prices for market prices , when they were really conversion prices. Farmers used to pay rent “in kind,” by...
(full context)
Book 4, Chapter 3
...(0.25% for silver and 0.5% for gold). It became advantageous to deposit bullion when the market price was low and withdraw it when the market price was high. Coin deposit receipts were...
(full context)
Book 5, Chapter 2
...and leads to fraud, so it’s better to collect them in money, depending on the market price of rude produce in any given year. If the price is instead fixed from year...
(full context)
Taxing interest may seem advantageous, because interest is like ground rent: it is a market price which taxation will not change. (Rather, taxes effectively deduct a portion of the investor or...
(full context)
