How will asteroid mining impact the economy? Just a side note, I'm not sure if this goes here, or in a science exchange...



Asteroids are expensive, and can easily be worth billions of dollars. They contain many types of precious metals, like gold, and platinum.

In the future, asteroid mining will be a huge business. With new advancements  in technology, and cheaper launches, we can ship asteroid material to Earth, with a huge ROI.

But how will bringing back all these metals impact the economy?
I doubt that asteroid mining will hugely increase ROI. Price is endogenous so it will fall as a response to increase in supply and hence ROI will fall. 

Assuming that space mining is not natural monopoly, or will not be monopolized by government it will decrease the price of those metals by shifting supply to the right in their individual markets (as mining them from space would not be done by profit seeking firms if it is cheaper to do on earth). 

Decrease of price in these resources will also decrease the prices of goods that use these metals as inputs shifting supply of those goods as well. 

Assuming this will happen for large enough number of markets it can also shift the whole aggregate supply in the economy. This means that the aggregate output will be higher at a lower price level (see the picture below). It will also raise welfare of consumers primarily in the main industries affected by the lower prices of those resources but also throughout the whole economy.