Capital Allocation

  

Categories: Banking, Metrics

Think: scarce precious financial resource allocation. Companies only have so much dough...they want to do 18 things, but they can only afford to do three. So who or what "wins"? Who gets that capital and how do they get it? That's the process of capital allocation.

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Karl Marx was a fiercely bearded German economist and philosopher.

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seriously look at beard .fierce. with the help of his equally bushy pal Friedrich [Marx pictured]

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angles Marx wrote a little book that would have enormous influence on the

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Russian revolutionaries of the early 20th century. that book of course was

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called Little House on the Prairie. it's just making sure you're with us. it

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was actually called the communist manifesto. so let's break it down .the

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world according to Marx suffers because of social classes. well in the Western

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world we started with feudalism as the class system .if you were a king life was

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groovy. if you were a serf and not so much. feudalism crashed and burned and

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capitalism rolled in with its booze huazi and proletariat classes. well

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according to the Communist Manifesto capitalism was much much much worse than

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feudalism. why ?because the booze huazi or owners are the means of production who [communist manifesto pictured]

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embraced capitalism would do anything to make a dollar.

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this included dehumanizing abusing and manipulating the proletariat or worker

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class who toiled on their behalf. so Marx and Engels believed that capitalism

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caused enormous suffering and hardship in the modern world. furthermore it

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caused corruption because the government was essentially in cahoots with the

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bourgeoisie. thanks to the unfairness inherent in capitalism Marxism states

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that the proletariat and bourgeoisie will forever be butting heads .more

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importantly that tension will eventually result in a revolution of the masses. and

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just what would that revolution look like? well Marx and Engels had a few

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ideas .there would be no private ownership of land. there would be no

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inheritance rights. the state would control the means of communication and

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transport .and instead of laboring in factories kids would go to school where

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they'd get a free education. the communist manifesto posits that Marxism

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would succeed where other forms of socialism had failed because communists

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would always put the proletariat first. furthermore other forms of socialism

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were nothing more than programs for small reforms .if the ship of the worker [different ships with different forms of government written on sails]

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was going to be set right full-blown an all-out revolution was needed.

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and that's what Marxism was all about. Marx and Engels like to think that

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Germany would be ground zero for the proletariat takeover.

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they probably rolled over in their graves when Hitler came to power, but

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never fear the Communist Manifesto was a home run for one group. da the Russians.

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at the turn of the 20th century there were two divisions of the Russian social

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democratic Labour Party .the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks many of whom had been

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kicked out of Russia for being naughty revolutionaries spent about a decade

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meeting in pubs in London. over a nice warm pint they'd argue about whose

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interpretation of Marxism was correct and what the best method for taking over

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Russia was .well frankly we would have picked somewhere tropical for our

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communist revolution but well to each his own. while the Mensheviks and [Castro pictured]

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Bolsheviks both wanted Russia to ditch capitalism and the Czar their

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medium-term goals were quite different. well the Mensheviks wanted to work with

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Russian officials already in office to build a kind of democratic system that

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would make Russia a better place for everyone. Bolsheviks wanted to burn it

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all down. well if you're wondering where Vladimir Lenin is and all this wonder no

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more it was at the head of the Bolsheviks. he thought the Mensheviks

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were wusses and that Russia's communist government would need to be small and

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tightly controlled so that the masses wouldn't rebel. anywho after all those

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years of plotting abroad the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks finally saw an

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opportunity to get things going in 1917. and viva la revolucion. but that's for [mob of Russians protest]

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another video. what, you thought we'd give you all the fun stuff right now?

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