I find myself a bit confused by Foley's paper. In Understanding Capital Foley himself speaks of finance and sales lags, so if financial firms, broadly conceived, reduce the time that it takes for industrial capital to secure financing to commence or recommence production or to book sales (think here of the bill of exchange) and if commercial firms also reduce the time it takes to realize the final product, then turnover times are reduced and the annual production of surplus value is thereby increased. It seems wholly possible that whatever surplus value is drained by financial and commercial firms is more than made up by the greater surplus value that they allow industrial firms to make over the course of, say, a year. I don't see why financial and commercial capital are necessarily unproductive from the perspective of the turnover of capital and the production of surplus value. It's easier for me to see how the hiring of a domestic servant is an expenditure of revenue, which basically leaks out of the system. Lakshmi
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