Is there a financial product that allows speculation on GDP?
The closest thing that you are looking for would be FOREX exchanges. Currency value is affected by the relative growth of economies among other things, and the arbritrage of currencies would enable you to speculate on the relative growth of an individual economy.
Here's how this works in the United States. There's no law regarding your behavior in this matter and you haven't broken any laws. But your broker-dealer has a law that they must follow. It's documented here: The issue is if you buy stock before your sell has settled (before you've received cash) then you're creating money where before none existed (even though it is just for a day or two). The government fears that this excess will cause undue speculation in the security markets. The SEC calls this practice freeriding, because you're spending money you have not yet received. In summary: your broker is not allowed to loan money to an account than is not set-up for loans; it must be a margin account. People with margin account are able to day-trade because they have the ability to use margin (borrow money). Margin Accounts are subject to Pattern Daytrading Rules. The Rules are set forth by FINRA (The Financial Industry Reporting Authority) and are here: Generally, anyone can. Selling them is an interesting point, as the buyer has a counterparty risk that you won't be able to pay at the term of the contract. So, if I was a vendor buying a derivative in my example, I would definitely get that derivative from a bank as opposed to my friend Jim Bob. Especially in cases of bespoke derivatives, it doesn't make sense for anyone except people who have material interest to by it, as the expectation value of the hedge is negative. Essentially, you're more likely to lose money than gain money from a hedge. The exception is when you have information above that of the market, which could allow for a positive return. That is the reason that people advocate for derivatives as mechanisms of price discovery, because large imbalances aren't likely to form when someone could arbitrage or even just take positions when the market goes out of whack. That only really works in publically traded markets, however, bespoke derivatives don't really contribute to better pricing afaik.  Of course, that's the simple explanation to a huge, complex, and varied field. Certainly, speculators exist, particularly in the more commoditized derivatives. Especially in the leadup to the financial crisis, large amounts were spent on exotic derivatives that blew up in people's faces. The easiest thing to say about them is that they are double edged swords. In theory, they're fantastic, as it allows risk to be spread around to people that want it. It should lead to a safer system, as hedged comapnies are less exposed to shocks and are more resilient. But in practice, we've alao seen them used as risk concentrators (AIG). We've seen cases where correlations arise that weren't assumed before, and what used to be manageable positions become lead weights. We've seen the dangers that large systemically important financial institutions have when they are a counterparty to tens of trillions in notional derivatives, as when they fail the risk of failure is over every derivative they are counterparty to, not just the hedged exposure.   Sorry, this is more than you asked for. I tend to get carried away. 1) Low-Interest Rate: Isn't the inflation rate currently (and over the last couple of years) also really low, around 2%? If you're saying the inflation rate is going to go back up, I'm curious as to your reasoning. I don't see any general decrease in the money supply in the near future, wages are stagnant, and GDP looks like it's trundling along at standard rates - however, with the Gini coefficient still rising, more and more of that production is finding its way into fewer and fewer hands that don't have a lot of incentive to re-invest it. I'd say that the assets are 'invested' in non-productive sectors of the economy such as the finance sector. Also in pure market speculation and in revolving corporate acquisitions which inflate the nominal money supply but don't increase either physical production or services delivered by one thimble or one minute. I'm not too worried about the math. I can't speak for the calculus, but I seriously doubt the statistics I will use will be more complicated than what I used in Econometrics.   Where will calculus come into play? I haven't heard any of my finance major friends talk about using anything more than simple derivation. QE is really interesting. I don't think there were ever any negative repercussions. We basically found a way to print money and use it in a way that doesn't cause massive inflation (i.e. Swapping assets out for cash, resulting in zero net value added into the economy). Is it ridiculous to assume we will just do this everytime there's a massive toxic asset bust? The answer to this question can be found in the related question  Is there any online personal finance software without online banking? There isn't one. I haven't been very happy with anything I've tried, commercial or open source. I've used Quicken for a while and been fairly happy with the user experience, but I hate the idea of their sunset policy (forced upgrades) and using proprietary format for the data files. Note that I wouldn't mind using proprietary and/or commercial software if it used a format that allowed me to easily migrate to another application. And no, QIF/OFX/CSV doesn't count. What I've found works well for me is to use Mint.com for pulling transactions from my accounts and categorizing them. I then export the transaction history as a CSV file and convert it to QIF/OFX using csv2ofx, and then import the resulting file into GNUCash. The hardest part is using categories (Mint.com) and accounts (GnuCash) properly. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better than manually exporting transactions from each account.