The advanced capitalist countries in the world economy commonly underwent a substantial transition in the early 1980s, in which their profit rates, after suffering from a tendency toward long-term decline, began to pick up again. We had entered the era of neo-liberalism. Their profit rates, with the exception of that in Japan, gradually and steadily strengthened the rising tendency toward the so-called 'Information Technology' bubble in the second half of the 1990s. The present paper at first in the Introduction categorizes surplus capital into the three concepts: i.e., absolute, relative, and absolute and relative surplus capital. Absolute surplus capital takes place in the period of an economic crisis and depression; relative surplus capital manifests itself, due to a series of absolute surplus capital, as the long-term declining tendency of profit rate; and absolute and relative surplus capital, combining the former two, takes a form of an expansion of fictitious capital. Corresponding to these forms of domestic surplus capital, international surplus capital also takes three forms and manifests itself as temporary trade surplus, a long-term accumulation of trade surplus and net capital export, and international circulation of securities capital, respectively (Section II). Section I empirically deals with the historic turning point in 1981 of the US capitalism, in which its long-term declining tendency of profit rate, beginning in 1965, was drastically turned over owing to the peak-out of the improvement of real wage rate. The end of the relative surplus of industrial capital also marked the beginning of the relative surplus of loan capital in 1981, when the unprecedented high interest rate policy of FRB began to ease. The combination of these opposite forms of surplus capital contributed to an expansion of fictitious capital and an economic bubble after the second half of the 1980s. Section III empirically discusses the relationship between trade imbalance and international surplus capital, and analyses its historical development in US, Japan and Germany by introducing a new concept of 'private surplus savings', defined as trade balance minus fiscal balance. Section IV describes the historical development of international surplus capital in three stages: i.e., bank loan in the 1970s, which led to the dramatic debt crisis of developing countries after 1982 onward; bond investment in the 1980s, which was strongly facilitated by the so-called 'twin deficit' of the US economy, being financed by a massive inflow of foreign capital into the Treasury securities; and finally, equity investment after the middle of the 1990s. International surplus capital established its final and complete form in equity capital with the help of some historical events such as the 'Big Bang' in the UK in 1986 and the reunification of Germany in 1990. It is the complete form in the sense that it combines bank loan and bond investment as its complementary elements. It has been globally circulating among advanced capitalist countries, developing countries, 'emerging markets', and 'economies in transition'. It is expected, however, to dissolve sooner or later thanks to the enormous accumulation of US international debt, which is not to be sustainable forever due to ever increasing leakage of income deficit in US international balance of payments. The world economy after the establishment of global securities capital would be more and more vulnerable to the fluctuation in investors' expectations regarding capital gains and losses. The fear is that the stock value of equity capital could easily shrink catastrophically without even a small amount of capital outflow. A massive capital flight follows a collapse of stock value, depending on investors' moody expectations. A strict foreign exchange control or proactive monetary policy could not effectively prevent that from taking place.
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