meehawl

It is clear that there is a shortage of means of payment during a period of crisis. The convertibility of bills of exchange replaces the metamorphosis of commodities themselves, and so much more so exactly at such times the more a portion of the firms operates on pure credit. Ignorant and mistaken bank legislation, such as that of 1844-45, can intensify this money crisis. But no kind of bank legislation can eliminate a crisis. In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur — a tremendous rush for means of payment — when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realised again. The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values. Incidentally, everything here appears distorted, since in this paper world, the real price and its real basis appear nowhere, but only bullion, metal coin, notes, bills of exchange, securities. Particularly in centres where the entire money business of the country is concentrated, like London, does this distortion become apparent; the entire process becomes incomprehensible.

Tags: banking, capitalism, Das Kapital, economics, Karl Marx by mike
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The New York Times has an article reviewing a book which basically worries that Silicon Valley “innovation” is hollowing, consisting mainly of me-too companies with low barriers to entry being funded by cautious, herd-chasing VC cash and bought by large technology companies flush with dumb public stock market funds that have lost the ability to generate internal innovation. The first irony is that the book is written by a person who profitted handsomely when her streaming video startup (“funded in 6 minutes“!) was bought by Cisco in the late 1990s using a no-money-down dilutive stock swap at the tail end of the streaming multimedia mini-bubble.

Part of the reason, she said, was that Cisco and other fast-growing big companies started acquiring start-ups with innovative technologies instead of developing new ideas internally.

The second irony? Right under the article, the first entry in the “Related” posts is Cisco Buys E-Mail and Calendaring Start-Up for $215 Million. Yes, in the middle of 2008, Cisco can still piss away $215m buying a three-year-old open-source, Linux-based email/calendar startup. In 2008, email/calendaring must be such a difficult, virtually intractable problem that it requires outside solutions.

Tags: capitalism, Cisco, innovation, PostPath, Silicon Valley, technology by mike
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A 2004 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that 61% of American corporations, including 39% of large companies, paid no corporate income taxes between 1996 and 2000. Last year, corporations shouldered just 14.4% of the total U.S. tax burden, compared with about 50% in 1940.

Tags: business, capitalism, corporate welfare, corporatism, taxes by mike
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