Marx made the perfectly rational assumption that the owners of revenue producing assets, be they interest-bearing assets such as shares or bonds, or rent producing assets such as land and property, own these assets, over the longer-term, to produce a revenue on which to live. If that revenue fell to a level below that minimum level, because too much potential money-capital had been diverted to the purchase of such assets, rather than being used productively, then the owners of that potential money-capital would put it to work, instead as industrial capital, where it would return for them the average industrial rate of profit. Because, interest and rent are deductions from profit, and because it is profit, under capitalist production, which acts as the regulator, this rate of profit is always greater than what can be obtained as interest or rent.
In other words, under capitalist production, capitalists will only borrow money-capital, and pay interest, or lease land, and pay rent, if, after having done so, they make, at least, the average industrial rate of profit. If they can't, they don't borrow money, and so interest rates fall, and they don't lease land or property, and so rents fall. Unlike under feudalism, where it was the rent paid to the landlord that was determinant, with profit being only a residual left to the independent producer after its payment, under capitalism, it is profit that is determinant, and these other revenues such as interest and rent, are now the residuals, left over, after the capitalist has made the average industrial profit.
Marx's wholly rational assumption was also based upon this. If money-capital does not get invested in actual production, then the production of surplus value does not increase, and, in the cases cited above, in which capital is consumed, in the way a farmer might consume their own seed-corn, the production of surplus value, itself a function of the mass of capital, might even fall. But, if interest and rent are merely deductions from surplus value, or, more correctly, from profits, as the realised money form of that surplus value, then a falling mass of profits means a decreasing ability to pay interest or rent. Falling revenues, in the form of interest or rent, should then result in the process described above, whereby money is taken out of those assets, and put to work productively, as industrial capital. But, also, the price of assets, be it financial assets or land and property, is determined by capitalising the revenues they produce, i.e. dividends/coupon, or rent. If the amount paid out as dividends/interest, or rent falls, then the price of shares/bonds and of land/property, should fall. That is itself manifest in the fact that the owners of those assets seek to sell them, and obtain money to use productively.
So, Marx's assumption was wholly rational that money cannot just continually accrue in the purchase of revenue producing assets, rather than being used productively, because unless its used productively to produce surplus value/profits, the ability to pay dividends/interest, or rent, out of those profits, is continually diminished, and that means not only that the revenues received by some of the owners of those assets falls to levels below what is required for their consumption, but that the prices of the assets themselves must fall. If those prices continue to be inflated, a bubble, then sooner or later, reality must impose itself, and the bubble will burst. And, Marx was entirely familiar with such bubbles, and the financial crises that ensued from them. Indeed, as he describes, prior to 1825, when the first generalised crisis of overproduction occurred, all crises were of this kind, as with the various bank crises when private banks issued excess amounts of their own bank-notes, or as with various bubbles such as the South Sea Bubble, John Law's Mississippi Scheme, The Credit Mobilier, the Tulipmania, or Railway Mania.
As Marx puts it in Capital I, distinguishing these financial crises from crises of overproduction,
“The monetary crisis referred to in the text, being a phase of every crisis, must be clearly distinguished from that particular form of crisis, which also is called a monetary crisis, but which may be produced by itself as an independent phenomenon in such a way as to react only indirectly on industry and commerce. The pivot of these crises is to be found in moneyed capital, and their sphere of direct action is therefore the sphere of that capital, viz., banking, the stock exchange, and finance.”
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