Читать книгу Creating Risk Capital - Ian Whalley - Страница 16

It should not be forgotten that England is enjoying a higher standard of living to-day because of the efforts of the nineteenth-century industrialists to open up vast tracts for settlement… and create risk capital. All of us… are living upon the riches that they made possible.

Bryher, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs (Paris Press, 2006), p. 312.

The novelist and poet Bryher was the daughter of an outstanding industrialist, Sir John Ellerman, and was herself a pioneer in publishing, literature and film, and a brave benefactor of refugees escaping Nazi persecution in the 1930s. Ellerman, whose father came to England from an emerging Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, built a shipping and property empire which helped to make him the richest man in Britain. His merchant fleet played a key role in the Boer War and then in World War I, when Britain faced a deadly submarine threat from an Imperial Germany.

It is the builders of enterprises, like Sir John Ellerman, who create risk capital in its classic form: the ownership capital, or equity, which serves as the core financing of private enterprise and represents much of our wealth. Equity, in this specific sense, is pure risk capital, but in a wider sense it conveys fairness and moral justice: key elements of the bedrock which all societies need in order to flourish.

Due in no small measure to the efforts of these enterprise builders and their supporters, an immense number and variety of enterprises enrich our civilisation. A broad view of the historical origins of enterprise, and of some entrepreneurs, founders and builders, provides useful background to the ideas which follow in this book. Further background comes from the different ways in which enterprises are organised, the diverse forms of ownership adopted, and the various ways of running them.

Enterprise, capital and credit are interdependent, so it is just as important to look at the evolution and development of capital and credit institutions as to look at enterprise itself. The interface between enterprise, capital and credit is to be found in the various capital structures adopted by individual enterprises, revealing the rich variety and depth of current financial systems.