Il credito è "uno dei più potenti strumenti di crisi e di truffe"

“What of the rôle of credit? Only brief, stray remarks are available, and it is hardly possible to distill from them a reliable formula. Credit plays a part in the trade cycle, but it does not rank among the causal factors. Credit is a powerful lever in the centralization of capital; it promotes new enterprises, encourage speculation and reckless ventures, strains production to the utmost, accelerates overproduction, intensifies the crises, and, presumably, aids in recovery. Credit, is “one of the most potent instruments of crises and swindle”. Credit gives impetus to enormous undertakings like railway building which may promote booms and crises. It is to be noted parenthetically that in these references he generally uses credit in the sense of corporate securities, and only at times in the sense of commercial bank credit; more than once it is hard to tell which type of credit as a determinant of crises. “The superficiality of Political Economy”, Marx teaches, “shows itself n the fact that it looks upon the expansion and contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes of the industrial cycle, as their cause” (57). A crisis on the money market, he says, merely masks “abnormal conditions in the process of production and reproduction” (58)” (pag 256-257) [M.M. Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History’, Cambridge, 1948] [(56) Capital, I, 687, 693; II, 361-363; III, 298, 359, 497, 522, 652, 713; ‘Theorien über den Mehrwert’, II, n. 2, p. 289; (57) Capital, I, 695; III, 575-576; (58) Capital, II, 365]