capital are able to obtain "advantages" which throw a certain light on the peculiarities of the age of finance-capital and monopolies. The following passage for instance, occurred in the Berlin review, Die Bank, for October, 1913.
"A comedy worthy of the pen of Aristophanes is being played just now on the international money market. Numerous countries, from Spain to the Balkans, from Russia to the Argentine, from Brazil to China are urgently seeking loans; sometimes very insistently. The money market is not at the moment very bright and the political outlook is unpromising. But no particular money market can make up its mind to refuse the loan, fearing that another might do so and obtain in return valuable considerations. In this kind of business, the lender almost always gets something: a beneficial commercial treaty, a coal mine, the construction of a port, a profitable concession, or an order for artillery."62
Finance-capital has created the period of monopolies, and monopolies bring with them everywhere their own methods: the utilisation of business "connections" for profitable transactions takes the place of open competition on the market. Nothing is more usual than to stipulate, before making a loan, that some of it will be spent on purchases in the country of issue, particularly in orders for war material or for ships. In the course of the last two decades (1890-1910), France often had recourse to this method. The export of capital abroad thus becomes a way to encourage the export of commodities. In these circumstances, transactions, especially between big firms, take on a form "bordering on corruption," as Schilder
