Private Equity

By Wayne Brown
I want to bookmark this subject for a detailed treatment.

Spectacular failures podcast -> Buyout of America

My thought is that two things happened to revolutionalize the "real economy":

  • (In agreement with Marx)  The commodification of human labour, introducing "wages" and the phenomenon that if you can't work, you die along with if you don't push wages to minimum and staff to a minimum, your business dies.
  • More recently "finance capitalism" which treats money itself as a "resource" and "output" totally divorced from the value which money itself is supposed to represent. Mathematically this self-reference is a recipe for chaos along with deep issues concerning the impossibility of a "model" of the economy. On the ground, it seems to have played a key role in many crashes of the "capitalist" economies.
  • I recently completed Burton's "Promised Land" which describes the land rush in the Candian West around 1910. Like all bubbles (such as the famous poppy craze) people bought and sold "X" on the theory that X would be worth a lot more very soon, not caring about what actually X is or any idea of actually using X. The idea is to "make" money, often by borrowing and investing "other people's money". This was my dad's famous secret to success until somebody borrowed his money. 
  • This is all linked to the critique of money as debt. When debt cannot be repaid, money vanishes. When money vanishes, it may disappear a long way away from where it was "created" in the system. People get rich at one end and people lose their homes and jobs at the other.
All worth my time when I can get back from my current kick, which is the autobiographies of the "movers and shakers" of the 20th century. What were they thinking? What were the "unknown unknowns" that undid them in the end?

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