Financial capital has always been at war with productive capital. Because it's more concentrated in power (and even geographically) it's easier for financial capital to be aware of its interests and work together towards them. Productive capital is dispersed and varied. Tim O'Reilly is the rare CEO who's smart enough to know what's going on and what side he's on. Good for him.
Describing these two types of capital as "at war" isn't a tremendously exhaustive explanation of that relationship in my view. Isn't it also very much a symbiosis?
Someone needs to provide productive capital in the form of equity. If that equity wasn't tradable, fewer people would be ready to provide that capital. If there was no financial capital, there wouldn't be any credit either.
So without much equity capital and without loans everything would have to be funded out of cash flow. There would be no large projects, no investment in future demand or longer term infrastructure, it would all be hand to mouth.
Also, in many cases that cash flow would eventually outgrow what a company or individual can productively deploy. Without creating financial capital out of that cash flow, ie lending the money to someone who can productively deploy it, that capital would be stuck even though it could be used productively elsewhere.
That's how it's supposed to work, finance as essentially the servant of productive industry, increasing liquidity and lubricating the economy. But owners of finance capital, like any capital, want to employ it in the maximally profitable ways, not "just" run a service industry, so also try to get the upper hand where they're in control of markets and the direction of businesses, with owners of productive capital essentially servicing them. Who actually is making decisions is a bit more complex than "a war", but I think there is a constant bit of power struggle, at least, with non-finance businesses wanting finance perform a service role, and finance not wanting to be boxed into one.
Is he the only multi-million CEO willing to speak out about this?
Or is the protest somehow in his realm that we're hearing about it?
Either way, there's little doubt that one $100 million CEO outweighs a lot of scruffy students. And in this case, amounts to something sadly futile. Even if he'd just got one friend CEO ... "and this is my friend Liz: she's a $150 million CEO, listen to what she thinks."
