On Nov 18, 2006, at 6:20 PM, boddi satva wrote:
> And what do we mean by "GDP" when so much of our stuff is produced
> overseas?
That appears as imports, a subtraction from GDP.
> But the point is that the availability of money does change. The world
> of the credit card and home loans approved over the phone and
> asset-backed securities is a different world from the world of bank
> notes and specie that Marx talked about.
Yes, but don't ever underestimate the capacity of the credit system to pump out loans, even in the old days. You think the Dutch bought tulip bulbs with real money?
> Hang on! "The problems of capitalism" is pretty broad. At some level
> the Marxian crisis IS a shortage of the circulating medium - too much
> "medium" in the hands of people who horde it and too little "medium"
> in the hands of people who produce things and need to buy them.
That's a distributional issue, not an issue of the aggregate quantity of money.
Doug