ABSTRACT
One of John Henry’s recent contributions is the reconstruction and integration of Marxian and Veblenian insights into the (theory of the) business enterprise as it pertains to the lingering global financial crisis and “Great Recession.” In particular, Henry has clarified relations among money, the credit-debt system, the financialization of the non-financial enterprise, predation and fraud, and the increasing fictitious character of money-capital, or, what he called, a “world of illusion” (Henry 2012). Starting from the Marxian theory of value production and surplus-value distribution, and from the Veblenian theory of the finance-dominated business enterprise, he argues that the differentiation among individual profit rates (PRs) and the race among capitalists for above-average individual PRs must be based on redistribution-that is, value manipulation, cheating, deception, and fraud are just systemic features of the current capitalist system (992ff.). The increasingly “putative” character of capital valuation, as Veblen observed, makes it “incumbent . . . to ‘manipulate’ securities with a view to buying and selling in such a manner as to gain control of . . . securities” (Veblen [1904] 2005, 161). Thus, we are talking not only of just expectations, imagination, phantasies, and herd psychology, but also of fraud and deception inherent in “[business] capital . . . as operative in the business of manipulation” (162). From an integrated Marx-Veblen perspective, Henry (2012) has further elaborated not only how all capital, now being traded in stock and securities markets, has become credit of all variations, and how this is subject to “good-will” or “folk psychology” (Veblen [1904] 2005, 149, also 99ff.)—subjective (over-)estimation, over-speculation, herd phantasies, and hypes-but also how this leads to credit inflation.
