I don't have the next thought wellformed, but don't the wealthiest people have to guarantee that they own a certain portion of the total wealth/social capital in order that it be "capital" with "capital power" ? If the bottom 6.28 billion people had a larger portion of the total, they could live comfortably and not depend on the richest to survive and live. Isn't the value of hedge fund wealth dependent in part on it being part of hedge fund owners and other finance capitalists owning a certain portion of total wealth ?
Of the different forms of wealth, what is the significance of fictitous capital ( if I use that term correctly)being so attenuated from a result of a labor process and from use-values ? Isn't owning it a way of indirectly owning and controlling a major portion of wealth that is in the form of non-fictitious capital ? What proportion of total wealth is far attentuated from attachment to any use-value ? By defining wealth as capital, isn't the value of that capital defined based on its ability to generate more capital ? What proportion of total wealth is in a form that is of use to the vast majority of the people ? Charles Julio Huato wrote: Say, the labor force will grow at 4% per year in the future and per-capita income at 1%. Then, the next best alternative is expanding global net income at a rate of 5% per year. This growth rate is assumed constant (since there's no risk, no volatility). So that's the global discount rate we should use to price our annuity. Thus, the discounted present value of global capital is: K = 30 trillion USD/0.05 = 600 trillion USD Another approach. According to the BEA, the value of fixed reproducible tangible wealth (including consumer durables) in the U.S. was $32.8 trillion in 2002. (Note that the rate of return on those assets implied by GDP is a lot higher than Julio's estimate - around 30%.) That year, according to World Bank stats, the U.S. had 32% of world GDP. So, scaling up based on that income share, we can estimate that the global capital stock is worth $102.1 trillion - or roughly $16,000 per capita. Doug