[Marxism] Two corrections

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

1. I wrote previously:

''As you can see, the value of the assets owned by the world's commercial
banks is estimated to be larger than the total mass of the world's total
share-capital."

This is not quite correct, since the statistic only refers to the share
capital of publicly listed companies - not all companies which issue shares
of various kinds are necessarily listed on the stockmarket, and those
companies listed may also utilise other types of equities which are not
listed. Therefore, the total equity capital is really larger that total
stock market capitalisation, although the latter would be the bulk of it.

2. Also, Louis brought to my attention that the English East India Company
was actually officially founded in 1600 challenging the Dutch traders and
Portuguese Estado da India, whereas the United Dutch East India Company was
founded in 1602. Thus, the EEIC was in fact officially started slightly
earlier than the UDEIC (which merged 8 proto-companies that in 1595-1602 had
sent 65 ships to Asia). The Danish East India Company was started in 1616,
the French East India Company was founded in 1664 (after a failed 1611
attempt), and the Swedish one in 1731.

However, the UDEIC nevertheless does technically appear to have been the
first joint-stock company (cf. http://www.oldest-share.com/ ).

For Marx's comments on the EEIC see:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/11.htm

More references at: http://www.uc.pt/bd.apm/bd.htm

Jurriaan


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