Bn Stock Quotes

Back in the late 1970s, the very affluent Hunt brothers decided to bring about the remonetization of silver and started buying enormous quantities of silver, driving the price up. Their rationale was that as the price rose, more people would want to buy, which would keep the price rising, which in turn would lead to people wanting to be paid in silver. Yet, no matter how much the Hunt brothers bought, their wealth was no match for the ability of miners and holders of silver to keep selling silver onto the market. The price of silver eventually crashed and the Hunt brothers lost over $1bn, probably the highest price ever paid for learning the importance of the stock‐to‐flow ratio, and why not all that glitters is gold.3 (See Figure 2.4)

Subsidy dependency has been coupled with the huge upturn in the so-called ‘financialisation’ of industry, whereby a company’s funds are increasingly dedicated to repurchasing their own shares in order to boost their stock price. In 2010, for example, the US American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) asked the US government to triple state spending on clean energy to $16bn a year, at the end of a decade in which the companies comprising the council had spent $237bn on stock repurchases.477 From 2008 to 2017, 466 S&P 500 companies distributed $4 trillion to shareholders as buybacks, equal to 53% of profits, along with $3.1 trillion as dividends.This is explained away on the social democratic left as shareholder greed. But it is driven by the need to valorise capital. We did not cover it earlier, but Marx identified the increasing role of share capital as one of the main counter-tendencies.