[lbo-talk] Capitalism on Derivatives?

[Carrol Cox]

Marv wrote:
>So then, part of what neoliberalism amounts to in my view is the
>discovery by capital that more profit could be made by investing in
>financial `products' than investing in production of tangible goods and
>services. In the large picture huge sums were taken out of industrial
>production systems and moved to non-production systems. There were many
>other aspects to neoliberalism's financialization model like expansion
>through mergers and acquisitions rather than investment in new
>production systems.

This doesn't really make sense unless you can show that industrial or
other "productive" firms were attempting to get funds and failing to do
so. The money was not so much "taken out of production" as failing to
find any production to invest in.

Another way to put the same point is to ask _why_, in other periods,
production offered higher profits  than fiscal "products"? It's the
change that has to be explained, not one situation in abstraction. Why
did production cease to be profitable? A change in the humabnnature of
rentiers?

Carrol