The Evolution of Finance Capitalism

2014 Reprint of Original 1938 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Edwards provides a detailed, interesting and well documented account of the development of a security capitalism whose outstanding characteristics are considered to the separation of the owner of securities from the management of enterprise and the impersonalization of the savings-investor and the savings-receiver. Beginning with a rising tide of investment in government securities, the pattern of development proceeds through the financing of the early public and private transportation companies, of the basic industries, including the railways; of foreign expansion; of preparation for war, and war; and finally, of a pervasion holding company structure. Everywhere its rise and development has been followed by crisis. For Edwards the main difficulty seems to be that those who garnered the economic power over financial manipulation tended almost universally toward irresponsibility in the matter of keeping a reasonable relationship between capitalization and real investment, resulting in excessive instability in the economic system.