>>Not very likely. The system has a built-in corrective factor, which kicks
>>in when abuses go too far. Harm to investor confidence harms the market,
>>which harms the ability of corporations to raise the capital they need to
>>grow and be profitable. Eventually, the capitalists' desire get investor
>>confidence back wins the day.
>
>So there.
>
>Doug
I though one of the arguments of your book Wall Street was that the "market" was not where corporations were raising capital for expansion. Corporations raise money through IPOs, but then the stock trades on the secondary market, where as Marx said, the stock exchange wolves fleece each other of their money capital. Don't most corporations follow Marx's schema in V2 of capital: M-C-(L, Mp)...P...C'-M"-C(L, Mp)...P...C"-M'", etc. that is, they use the money capital realized in a previous production cycle to purchase means of production (Mp) and labor-power (L) for next period of production (P). Credit allows the expansion of corporations, but a lot of it is fictitious capital, which disappears when the bubble bursts.
In the section on "Real Capital and Money Capital" in V3, Marx makes the argument that if capitalists used their own capital rather than borrowed money capital (bank loans, stocks and bonds) there would be no stock market. The expansion and contraction of real productive capital is determined by the scale of production and the state of the market for the commodities produced, ie, whether they can be sold to realize the surplus value contained in them. The rate of interest on loaned capital and dividends on securities piggy-back off the industrial cycle of real production. Investors, ie money-capitals, view the capitalist economy from its most "insane form", capital-interest. Ideologists, like the above writer, merely make an occupation of perfecting the money-capitalist's illusions about himself. That's hardly a built-in corrective, it's a built-in time bomb, that inevitably explodes at some point in the business cycle.
grs
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