Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Corporate China vs America Incorporate?

Yesterday I read an email from Goldman Sacks. The author claimed that his "product" justified his salary.  What was that product?  I think he called it "liquidity."  I call it money.

Remember ec 101?  The central dogma of capitalism is that increased productivity generates capital making the capitalist richer and providing a motivation for the owners to pay more to the workers so the latter can buy more.  This increased buying power increases the vlaue of the capital. 

Seems like a perpetual motion machine?  Very quickly, however, capitalism ran into a need for someone to act as a referee of the money supply.  Without national banks, capitalism would run out of "money" to accommodate all this growth.

So, for the last two centuries or so we have had the odd couple .. Capitalism building capital while the banks controlled the money supply so that there was enough money (no deflation)  but not too much (aka inflation).

OOOPS.  Along comes modern Wall Street.  One estimate I have read says that Wall Street now accounts for FORTY PERCENT of America's GDP. Of course Wall Street describes itself as the "Financial Industry."   So this 40% must mean there is a product?  Wall Street's products are "instruments" ... not cars or songs or computer programs but "instruments."

What is an "instrument?"  Like pins, corn, soy beans, or software these products must have some substance to have value.  That substance is MONEY.  In effect Wall Street now competes with the Federal Reserve by creating MONEY!

Of course corporate states, CHINA, Unltd in particular, understand that.  That is why they have sovereign banks that both print money and invest it.  Rather l;ike bundling Goldman Sachs with the Fed Reserve?

Now are you scared?
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Evolution of the US Financial Industry from 1860 to 2007: Theory and Evidence.∗ http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/finsize.pdf