Open market

The term open market is used generally to refer to a situation close to free trade and in a more specific technical sense to interbank trade in securities.

In economic theory

Economists judge the "openness" of markets according to the amount of government regulation of those markets, the scope for competition, and the absence or presence of local cultural customs which get in the way of trade. In principle, a fully open market is a completely free market in which all economic actors can trade without any external constraint. In reality, few markets exist which are open to that extent, since they usually cannot operate without an enforceable legal framework for trade which guarantees security of property, the fulfillment of contractual obligations associated with transactions, and the prevention of cheating.

A physical open market is a space or place where anyone wishing to trade physical goods may do so free of selling charges and taxes and has come to be regarded by many activists as the ultimate social enterprise and a major tool for tackling unemployment

Open Market

Open Market was an ecommerce software startup, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in early 1994. It went public in 1996 on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol OMKT, as one of the first ecommerce IPOs. It relocated to Burlington, Massachusetts in early 1998.

In 1999, Open Market acquired Future Tense, founded in 1995, to combine its ecommerce software with Future Tense's content management system.

Open Market was later acquired by Divine in 2001 for about $59 million. Divine later filed for bankruptcy in early 2003. In the same year, Soverain Software acquired Open Market's ecommerce assets, including the TRANSACT product.FatWire Software acquired Open Market's content management business from the Divine bankruptcy. FatWire has extended the Open Market software and currently services Open Market's original content management customer base.

Products and technology

Open Market developed a number of software products, including:

Open market operation

An open market operation (OMO) is an activity by a central bank to give (or take) liquidity in its currency to (or from) a bank or a group of banks. The central bank can either buy or sell government bonds in the open market (this is where the name was historically derived from) or, which is now mostly the preferred solution, enter into a repo or secured lending transaction with a commercial bank: the central bank gives the money as a deposit for a defined period and synchronously takes an eligible asset as collateral. A central bank uses OMO as the primary means of implementing monetary policy. The usual aim of open market operations is - asides from supplying commercial banks with liquidity and sometimes taking surplus liquidity from commercial banks - to manipulate the short-term interest rate and the supply of base money in an economy, and thus indirectly control the total money supply, in effect expanding money or contracting the money supply. This involves meeting the demand of base money at the target interest rate by buying and selling government securities, or other financial instruments. Monetary targets, such as inflation, interest rates, or exchange rates, are used to guide this implementation.