Moreover, such a mode of expansion is
only appropriate to certain manufacturing trusts: the
owners of railroad, financial and other trusts must look
always more to foreign investments for their surplus
profits. This ever-growing need for fresh fields of investment
for their profits is the great crux of the financial
system, and threatens to dominate the future economics
and the politics of the great Republic.
The financial economy of American capitalism exhibits
in more dramatic shape a tendency common to the
finance of all developed industrial nations. The large,
easy flow of capital from Great Britain, Germany, Austria,
France, etc., into South African or Australian mines,
into Egyptian bonds, or the precarious securities of South
American republics, attests the same general pressure
which increases with every development of financial machinery
and the more profitable control of that machinery
by the class of professional financiers
The kind of way in which such conditions tend
toward war might have been illustrated, if Mr. Hobson
had been writing at a later date, by various more
recent cases. A higher rate of interest is obtainable
on enterprises in an undeveloped country than in a
developed one, provided the risks connected with an
unsettled government can be minimized.
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