Shareholding Quotes

“If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Up until the end of the 16th century, even global trading outfits like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources that none could accomplish in isolation. But then, on the September 24, 1599, in a half-timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, something momentous happened. A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. Once could own a piece of the company without being involved of it, indeed without even telling anyone. The first global joint-stock company was thus born, undoubtly Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The right to issue unlimited quantities of anonymously tradable shares, along with the institution of a liquid market for them, created something new: corporations with power so immense, it dwarfed that of their countries of origin, and could be deployed in faraway places assiduously to exploit people and resources. Shareholding and well-governed share markets fired up history, separating ownership from the rest of the East India Company’s activities unleashed a fluid, irresistible force. Unchecked, the East India Company grew more powerful than the British state, answerable only to its shareholders. At home, its bureaucracy corrupted and largely controlled Her majesty’s government. Abroad, its 200,000-strong private army oversaw the destruction of well-functioning economies in Asia and a number of Pacific islands and ensured the systematic exploitation of their peoples.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“That a system evolved in a given environment only proves it’s best at replicating itself in that environment. […] That doesn’t make it a system that we should want to live in, nor, more importantly, is it any indication of its ability to survive over the longer term. Environments change, sometimes rapidly, sometimes because of the system’s own ill-effects. Out-competing other systems rather than living harmoniously with them can eventually be self-destructive. Viruses are a good case and point. [...] The question is not whether share-trading and capitalism have out-competed other systems up until now, but whether their effects are consistent with their hosts’ survival.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The real force that pushed history to breakneck velocity […] was not the share market. Share markets were simply not liquid enough to bankroll Edison-sized ambitions. At the turn of the 20th century […] neither the banks nor the share markets could raise the kind of money needed to build all those power stations, grids, factories and distribution networks. To get those vast projects off the ground, what was required was an equivalently-sized network of credit. Hand-in-hand, shareholding and technology led to the creation of shareholder-owned mega banks, willing to lend to the new mega firms by generating a new kind of mega debt. This took the form of vast overdraft facilities for the Thomas Edisons and the Henry Fords of the world. Of course, the money they were lent did not actually exist… yet. Rather, it was as if they were borrowing the future profits of their mega firms in order to fund those mega firms’ construction.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The East India Company was no apparition though; it was the template for many subsequent corporations […] Liberals betray themselves […] the moment they turn a blind eye to this kind of hyper-concentrated power. […] This is why trading in apples does not come even close to trading in shares. Large quantities may produce, at worse, lots of bad cider, but large amounts of money invested in liquid shares can release demonic forces that no market or state can control.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“A contemporary commentator drew an analogy between the East India Company’s ownership structure and the River Thames’ splendid flux, which leaves it ‘still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance.’ Once the property rights over a firm become detached from the people that set it up and work in it, it becomes a corpus in flux. It acquires a liquid life of its own, it can grow out of any human proportion. Indeed, like a river, it becomes potentially immortal.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“When you do not know how to make money in a particular space, hand it out to experts, you will still ‘Own Your Piece Of The Pie”
― Sandeep Sahajpal, The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!