Interest And Capital

Interest and Capital brings together Michał Kalecki's published fragments on monetary theory and policy to explore his distinctive approach to money and its circulation in the capitalist economy. Toporowski lays out Kalecki's critique of the international monetary arrangements proposed by Keynes and White at Bretton Woods, casting new light on the international monetary imbalances that have since disrupted the international economy. The greater importance of debt management revealed in Kalecki's monetary analysis makes it particularly relevant to the policy dilemmas of developing countries and governments facing high levels of debt in the wake of recent global crises. In Kalecki's theoretical approach, money has both an industrial and a financial circulation. Corporate finance takes its place at the centre of monetary considerations because it is the money of capitalists that is the autonomous determinant of expenditure in the economy. This theory has important implications for the rate of interest, which is not related to the rate of profit, nor to the kind of portfolio adjustments necessary to maintain portfolio equilibrium, but to the kind of financing that may prevail in any given phase of the business cycle.

Produced throughout the first fifteen years of Hayek's career, the writings collected in Capital and Interest see Hayek elaborate upon and extend his landmark lectures that were published as Prices and Production and work toward the technically sophisticated line of thought seen in his later Pure Theory of Capital. Illuminating the development of Hayek's detailed contributions to capital and interest theory, the collection also sheds light on how Hayek's work related to other influential economists of the time. Highlights include the 1936 article 'The Mythology of Capital' presented here alongside Frank Knight's criticisms of the Austrian theory of capital that prompted it - and 'The Maintenance of Capital', with subsequent comments by the English economist A. C. Pigou. These and other familiar works are accompanied by lesser-known articles and lectures, including a lecture on technological progress and excess capacity. An introduction by the book's editor, leading Hayek scholar Lawrence H. White, places Hayek's contributions in careful historical context, with ample footnotes and citations for further reading, making this a touchstone addition to the University of Chicago Press's Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series.

This book follows a conversational approach in five dozen stories that provide an insight into the colorful world of financial mathematics and financial markets in a relaxed, accessible and entertaining form. The authors present various topics such as returns, real interest rates, present values, arbitrage, replication, options, swaps, the Black-Scholes formula and many more. The readers will learn how to discover, analyze, and deal with the many financial mathematical decisions the daily routine constantly demands. The book covers a wide field in terms of scope and thematic diversity. Numerous stories are inspired by the fields of deterministic financial mathematics, option valuation, portfolio optimization and actuarial mathematics. The book also contains a collection of basic concepts and formulas of financial mathematics and of probability theory. Thus, also readers new to the subject will be provided with all the necessary information to verify the calculations.

Is macroeconomic equilibrium possible under capitalism? How do economic bubbles develop? How does a monetary system influence the market mechanism? Is the return on capital a beneficial feature of the economic system? How does complexity of a capitalist organization influence the market process? Can output under capitalism be easily measured and modeled? Such questions and many others relate to the central concept discussed in the book: heterogeneous structure of production, an envisioned theoretical connection between stages of the capitalist process. An inquiry into the functioning of a capital structure is necessary to understand the workings of the interest rate, savings, aggregate demand, and economic growth. Additionally it provides a theoretical framework to recognize consequences of monetary regimes and interest rate policies performed by the central banks. Capital structure concepts have their place at the center of economic theory as they can provide a broad range of insights into our understanding of the real world. Money, Interest, and the Structure of Production offers key insights in that direction.