Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Debt Deflation, the Rentier Economy, and the Coming Financial Cold War

The financial sector today is decoupled from industrialization. Its main interface with industry is to provide credit to corporate raiders. Their objective is asset stripping, They use earnings to repay financial backers (usually junk-bond holders), not to increase production. The effect is to suck income from the company and from the economy to pay financial elites.
These elites play the role today that landlords played under feudalism. They levy interest and financial fees that are like a tax, to support what the classical economists called “unproductive activity.” That is what I mean by “parasitic.”
If loans are not used to finance production and increase the economic surplus, then interest has to be paid out of other income. It is what economists call a zero-sum activity. Such interest is a “transfer payment,” because it that does not play a directly productive function. Credit may be a precondition for production to take place, but it is not a factor of production as such.

The situation is most notorious in the international sphere, especially in loans to governments that already are running trade and balance-of-payments deficits. Power tends to pass into the hands of lenders, so they lose control – and become less democratic.

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