Finance for the Rich, ‘Aid’ for the Poor

Rob Steven
Additional contact information
Rob Steven: University of New South Wales

Chapter 6 in Japan and the New World Order, 1996, pp 201-245 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Money is the most flexible of all forms of capital. This is because quantity is the sole feature that distinguishes different parcels of money from one another and because these quantities can be so easily expressed in the form of bank notes, promissory notes of one kind or another or even electronically. Money can move across national borders with greater speed than either traded commodities or relocated factories, and it can be transformed into and out of either of these in an instant. The capitalist system functions through its movements, into and out of other forms of capital and from one part of the world to another, in response to fluctuations in profit, which are in turn all expressed in terms of quantities of money. Since on its own, without constant transformation into productive and commodity capital, money is no more than an idle hoard, its apparent magical power to multiply itself and to command whatever it fancies stems from its relationships with trade and investment. Indeed the special feature of Japan’s international finance is the exceptional tightness of the networks which preserve close relationships between trade, investment and finance. Apart from the brief period of the bubble economy in the late 1980s, when Japanese money seemed to fly in all directions into and out of almost anything, often with little apparent purpose or monitoring, these same networks have spearheaded Japanese capital’s international onslaught into world money markets.

Keywords: Advanced Country; International Capital; World Order; Security Investment; Official Development Assistance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-24317-4_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349243174

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-24317-4_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().