Capital III, Chapter 19 - Part 10

“The money-dealers do not buy the precious metals. They merely handle their distribution as soon as the commodity trade has bought them. They facilitate the settling of balances, inasmuch as money serves as the means of payment, and reduce through the artificial mechanism of these settlements the amount of money required for this purpose. But they do not determine either the connections, or the volume, of the mutual payments. The bills of exchange and the cheques, for instance, which are exchanged for one another in banks and clearing houses, represent quite independent transactions and are the results of given operations, and it is merely a question of a better technical settlement of these results.” (p 321)

Payments in cash either as means of circulation, or means of payment are undertaken separate from the money dealing capitalist. If I buy a chocolate bar, and hand over coins, or hand over cash to the landlord for rent, the money dealer is not involved in these transactions. But, the more cash is removed from the economy, for example, the recent introduction of the use of mobile phones for making payments etc., the more the role of the money dealer increases, because their services are required for all such transactions.

What distinguishes this money-dealing capital, in its pure form, from merchant capital, is that it has no circuit of its own. The money dealing capitalist does not advance their own capital as payment, but only the money-capital of the merchant and industrial capitalists, and the capital that is returned is not their capital either, but the capital of the merchants and industrialists on whose behalf they act as agents.

“It is equally evident that the money-dealers' profit is nothing but a deduction from the surplus-value, since they operate with already realised values (even when realised in the form of creditors' claims).

Just as in the commodity trade, there is a duplication of functions, because a part of the technical operations connected with money circulation must be carried out by the dealers and producers of commodities themselves.” (p 322)

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