In an old lbo post, Doug wrote: Seriously rich people tend to move assets into municipal bonds and other fixed-income investments; they own claims to revenue, not surplus value.
Can this be expanded on. And also --
As of several years ago, BlackRock Investment Management held or managed assets of over 4 trillion. Also a bit of miscellaneous bits. Over 400 employees at JPMorganChase are devoted solely to relations with BlackRock. BlackRock also has its representatives on the Boards of major corporations. (I believe its CEO might have become Sec. of the Treasury in a Clinton cabinet.)
I really have only the vaguest idea of "investment management," so all clarification is welcome. And my main question: How does the existence of such corporations relate to the statement quoted above. Who owns the corporations & how do the 1% "hold" their money?
Carrol
"... claims to revenue, not surplus value." Response to this question calls for a Marxist analysis, at least as I have learned from reading Marx and understand what he has written, and in that framework the question answers itself. All value derives from human labor in productive activity, not rent, not interest, not property valuation; that is, all value derives from surplus value, including value embodied in so-called "revenue, municipal bonds and other fixed-income investments." All financial assets are a claim on future value, which then is derived solely from and must return for ultimate satisfaction to future surplus labor. There can be no "revenue" in this scheme of things that is not so positioned. At some point in the last thirty or forty years or more debt, instead of productive activity, financial speculation became, if not primary then evermore important as a source of revenue and profit. Finance, while essential to expansion of industrial capital, increasingly became a thing-in-itself. And the problem, of course, is that the can will be kicked down the road only for so long in this debt-saturated economy, but while there will be future surplus value there is no way that these several hundred trillions of dollars in principle and interest, and growing, on these debt-claims on anything like such an increasing, equivalent quantity of surplus value can be honored. Bail-outs of financial institutions and manipulation of the money supply and Keynesian stimuli to investment and payment only of accumulated interest and passing the problem onto the backs of those least able to pay while they can still pay can be stopgaps but these claims are nonredeemable, and at some point they will be called in and we're hanging by our thumbs and great must be the fall thereof.
That's how I understand it. You?
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