Black Monday

[Panda-NZ-]

Don’t think so mate. Your comrades in the Greens and those radicals in the Maori party are desperately trying to redistribute wealth.

They have never been in power for 200 years either

It's mostly irrelevant what they think.

[moka]

Compound growth is now the problem.

David Harvey - The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles. The basic premise of his book is that global capitalism is facing a number of existential crises, many of which are products of capital’s own internal contradictions.

Capital is always about growth: it has to be because it is animated by the pursuit of profit. A healthy capitalist economy is one where everybody has positive profits, which means that there is more value at the end of the day than there was at the beginning. The surplus value at the end of the day is then used, under the force of the “coercive laws” of competition, to create more value. Capitalist growth is compound growth. Compound growth is now the problem. The size of the economy doubles almost every 25 years.

The $4 trillion economy that existed in 1950 grew to $40 trillion economy as of 2000, and to $80 trillion in 2020 (in constant 1990 dollars)

If this continues, as the laws of motion of capital suggest it must, then we have to face a $160 trillion economy by 2050, $320 trillion by 2075, and $640 trillion economy by the end of the century. This is what compound growth does. It challenges all barriers and limits even as it seems to postulate an impossibility of achieving its endless spiral of growth.
The exponential growth of the global money supply and of global credit moneys since 1970 testify to the underlying compounding growth trajectory and the critical problems posed for production, distribution, consumption and the realization of value within global market under the rule of capital.

Capital is having real difficulty finding profitable investment opportunities for $80 trillion.
Where and how money capital can be profitably invested is a critical problem, particularly since there is only one type pf capital that can accumulate without limit, and that is money capital.

When world money was constrained by gold, it couldn’t accumulate infinitely. But the gold standard was abandoned in 1971 and the money supply of the world was liberated from its gold base. Thereafter we get this tremendous growth in the money supply. When we get into economic difficulties, the Federal Reserve simply prints more money, which adds to the compounding of the quantity of money in circulation. But then the question is what is that money going to do, and how is it going to be profitably invested?

While the failure of the dominant political-economic model is clearly visible and political protests are proliferating, there is at this time little consideration given to how the underlying problems might be addressed within or outside of the existing frameworks of economic management of the global capitalist economy. Capital cannot survive in its current form on its current growth trajectory. On the one hand, we can’t do without it, on the other hand, it is on a suicidal path. This is the central dilemma.