>Profitability has been quite high in the U.S. for the last few years,
>but investment has been low.
But that's Grossman's point. Profits are still made (and quite a lot through centralization of capital as I have already emphasized), but additional investment is pointless. As Rick Kuhn, quoting Grossman, puts it: 'instead of accumulating the surplus valueŠ - that is, incorporating it into the original capital - they will earmark it for capital export.' In this 'state of capital saturation', '[w]ith no chance in production, capital is either exported or switched to speculation', which can itself be understood as 'inner capital export'. http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/pdf/2006confpapers/papers/Kuhn.pdf
>(I'm sure someone will counter that
>profitability isn't high if you perform the necessary value magic,
>but I don't know any capitalists who experience properly transformed
>profitability.) Corps have been shoveling huge amounts of cash into
>their shareholders' pockets through dividends, buybacks, and
>takeovers. Shareholders want very high rates of return, very quickly,
>before they'll tolerate capital expenditures in any quantity.
>
>There's been quite a bit of investment in China and India, though, so
>the scarcity of investment opportunities isn't universal.
The investments are often made at an already high organic composition of capital which portends sooner than later profitability difficulties. Greenfield investments in China may even have a higher organic composition of capital than average in the already advanced capitalist countries, though I have not been reading the businss press as of late.
But most of this investment is internally financed, so it does not seem to be solving the problem of scarcity investment opportunities, though perhaps investment abroad by US multinationals is making up for weak investment at home? Though again these investments seem to be capital intensive.
Yours, Rakesh
>
>Privatization and the rest were in large part strategies to increase
>profitability, and they worked pretty well.