Professional investors are bombarded on a day to day basis with assertions about the role liquidity is playing and will play in determining prices in the financial markets. Few, if any, of the providers or recipients of such advice can truly claim to understand the well-springs of such liquidity and the transmission mechanisms through which it impacts asset prices.

This groundbreaking new book explores the belief that at the core of liquidity there is a force which exerts individuals to effect a financial transaction when they would not otherwise do so. Understanding this force of...