July 26, 2020

The question economists could not answer for 200+ years

Comment on Tom Hickey on “Where do profits come from? — Nathan Tankus”

Blog-Reference

Where do profits ultimately come from? Macroeconomic profit is not made from a longer labor time, not from higher productivity, not from innovation/creative destruction, not from a lower wage rate, not from more greed, not from exploitation, not from monopoly power, not from risk-taking, not from rent-seeking, not from wishful thinking or any other subjective factor, but in the most elementary case of the production-consumption economy from the dissaving/deficit spending of the household sector, i.e. Qm≡−Sm. Starting with a balanced-budget economy, macroeconomic profit presupposes credit/money creation by the banking sector (central bank and commercial banks). Macroeconomic profit has nothing to do with property rights. The Profit Law holds for capitalism and communism.

Accordingly, microeconomic profit is the result of the continuous redistribution of macroeconomic profit between the firms that constitute the business sector. If macroeconomic profit is zero, i.e. if the household sector's budget is balanced, then the sum of microeconomic profits is equal to the sum of microeconomic losses.

Macroeconomic profit comes ultimately from the household and state sector’s deficit spending/money creation.#1-#6

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#1 Profit
#2 The Levy/Kalecki Profit Equation is false
#3 Truth by definition? The Profit Theory is axiomatically false for 200+ years
#4 The profit theory is false since Adam Smith
#5 Cross-references Profit
#6 The Profit Law, Wikimedia AXEC143d


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REPLY to NeilW on Jul 27

You ask: “Anybody spotted where Apple's cash pile sits in all this? There's a section for household saving, but none for dead net saving by corporations.”

It's there for all who can read and think.

The distributed profit of the business sector is given by Yd.#1 The difference between profit Qm and distributed profit Yd is retained profit Qre and this is the cash pile the corporations sit on if they don't buy government bonds or other financial assets or reinvest.

Learn economics. I recommend the textbook Sovereign Economics.#2


#1 The Profit Law, Wikimedia AXEC143d
#2 Amazon or BoD


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Wikimedia AXEC109i