[PEN-L:330] Re: Cyber-Sawicky, I

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Max, you write:

>The story goes that the trust fund is nothing but "IOUs." The IOUs in
>question are government bonds. Professionals who believe them to be
>quite real trade billions of these every day. The fact is that a
>capitalist economy runs on IOUs: government bonds, corporate bonds,
>stocks, paper money, mortgages and a million other things. We are well
>past the era when market exchange consisted of nothing but barter.

There's one oddity about this situation though - this is one branch of
government borrowing from another. This is one of those things you have to
savor as the wackiness of capital, which can capitalize dissimulated
intent. At base, it's either a deferred taxation scheme or a deferred
intent to roll over the debt rather than repay it. But in appearance, it's
interest-bearing capital, the mother of every insane form, as KM said.

Doug