Your data is rotting. Not metaphorically. Not in some hand-wavy "data quality matters" sense. Your data is losing measurable economic value with every hour it sits unprocessed, and the infrastructure you built to manage it has no concept of that loss. No depreciation schedule. No freshness SLOs. No expiration dates. Just an ever-growing lake of records that your systems treat as equally authoritative whether they were ingested this morning or eighteen months ago. Finance figured this out centuries ago. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. That single insight, the time value of money , underpins every financial instrument on earth: discounted cash flow, net present value, bond pricing, options theory. The entire machinery of modern capital allocation is built on the assumption that value decays over time unless actively maintained. Data has the same property. We just pretend it doesn't.…