Re: [OPE] Productive and unproductive labour in the financial sector

From: Paul <wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
Date: Wed Jul 15 2009 - 17:54:40 EDT

Philip Dunn wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISIM
>
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Did you write that wiki page Philip?

The argument there seems remarkably unpersuasive. It admits that banking
labour is not fully paid for out of charges for transactional services (
clearing cheques etc ) and that it is supported out of interest.
Now suppose that a car firm is a public company with no debt. Its
profits are then distributed as dividends.
If the firm is bought up by private equity and loaded up with debt,
these dividends are transformed
into interest, but the when the interest payments were dividends it was
clear that their value was
created by the productive workers in the car firm. Since the bank
workers are being supported out
of this income which has already been accounted for as created by the
car workers, how can it
be claimed that the bank workers are productive?
It is pretty clear that they are just consuming a share of the surplus
that previously went as dividends.
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Received on Wed Jul 15 17:56:51 2009

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