From Fallen London Wiki (Staging)
i finally understand why this action exists: it's a trap for optimizers. every single cost that doing this incurs is fixed, and it cashes out an unbounded amount of prosperity at once. technically, losing all your prosperity and needing to grind it back up can be amortized away by just grinding in sufficiently large batches.
(i say it's a trap because i don't think this option is any *good*, despite that. the batch sizes which would be necessary to make the cost negligible are incredibly impractical.)