I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Capital isn't this pile of money sitting somewhere; it's an accounting construct.
If you look at the history of the American capital market, there's probably no innovation more important than the idea of generally accepted accountancy principles.
I understand that finance can be very complex.
Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.
As the founder and former chief executive of two publicly traded companies, I have had a great deal of exposure to how debt markets work.
The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.
Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
My only foray into anything stock-market-related was in my eighth grade social studies class. I have steered clear ever since.
In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.
We started CapitalSource because large banks were ignoring small to mid-sized businesses, and we saw a big business opportunity as a result.