Capital Vol. III by Karl Marx

Author:Karl Marx [Marx, Karl]
Language: por
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 2011-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. "The labourer possesses capital-value, which is arrived at by considering the money-value or his annual wage as income from interest.... Capitalising ... the average daily wage at 4%, we obtain the average value of a male agricultural labourer to be: German Austria, 4,500 taler; Prussia, 4,500; England, 3,750; France, 2,000; inner Russia, 750 taler." (Von Reden,Vergleichende Kultur-Statistik, Berlin, 1848, p. 434.)

2. [Immediately after the February Revolution, when commodities and securities were extremely depreciated and utterly unsaleable, a Swiss merchant in Liverpool, Mr. B. Zwilchenbart — who told this to my father — cashed all his belongings, travelled with cash in hand to Paris and sought out Rothschild, offering to participate in a joint enterprise with him. Rothschild looked at him fixedly, rushed towards him, grabbed him by his shoulders and asked: "Avez-vous de l'argent sur vous?" — "Oui, M. le baron." — "Alors vous êtes mon homme!" ("Have you money in your possession?" — "Yes, Baron." — "Then you are my man!") — And they did a thriving business together. — F.E.]

3. [This doubling and trebling of capital has developed considerably further in recent years, for instance, through financial trusts, which already occupy a heading of their own in the report of the London Stock Exchange. A company is organised for the purchase of a certain class of interest-bearing of foreign government securities, English municipal or American public bonds, railway stocks, etc. The capital, for example, £2 million, is raised by stock subscriptions. The Board of Directors buys up the values in question or speculates more or less actively therein, and after deducting the expenses distributes among the stockholders the annual interest as dividends. Furthermore, some stock companies have adopted the custom of dividing the common stock into two classes, preferred and deferred. The preferred receive a fixed rate of interest, say, 5%, provided that the total profit permits it; if there is anything left after that, the deferred receive it. In this manner, the "solid" investment of capital in preferred shares is more or less separated from actual speculation — with deferred shares. Since a few large enterprises have been unwilling to adopt this new custom, the expedient has been resorted to of organising new companies which invest a million or several million pounds sterling in shares of the former companies and then issue new shares amounting to the nominal value of the purchased shares, but half of them are issued as preferred and the other half as deferred. In such cases the original shares are doubled, since they serve as a basis for a new issue of shares. — F.E.]

4. [To what extent this has intensified since then is shown by the following official tabulation of the bank reserves of the fifteen largest London banks in November 1892, taken from the Daily News of December 15, 1892:

Name of Bank Liabilities Cash Reserves Percentages

City £9,317,629 £746,551 8.01

Capital and Counties 11,392,744 1,307,483 11.47

Imperial 3,987,400 447,157 11.22

Lloyds 23,800,937 2,966,806 12.46

Lon. And Westminster 24,671,559 3,818,885 15.50

Lon. And S. Western 5,570,268 812,353 14.

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