Code of Capital
by Katharina Pistor · first published 2019
50% recommend50% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explains how legal code turns assets like venture stakes and debt into protected capital, and how lawyers build that protection. Praised as well written and insightful for readers of finance, law and wealth structures.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to prot
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…critical to the functioning of the financial system. New kinds of assets are created all the time. One of the best written books I have read recently goes into venture capital and debt asset creation: The Code Of Capital - Katharina Pistor The role of different kinds of money in history, especially US history, is absolutely fascinating. I am in the middle of American Bonds - Sarah Quinn and can recommend. I do not…
on “Ask HN: Book recommendations for understanding financial systems?” ↗I highly recommend reading The Code of Capital by Katharina Pistor. The book does a good job explaining the essential aspect of law in codifying assets into capital. Wealth is impossible to own and maintain without legal support.
on “The Price of a Harvard Lawyer” ↗…creditors. Sometimes people/orgs playing these roles are large and powerful but often they are not. There is a huge literature here. The most recent best book I've read on these issues is Katarina Pistor "The Code of Capital." Highly recommend pursuing a path to adopt more precise language on these matters. Cheers.
on “On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses” ↗…so therefore prone to collapse. He notes that every economy in history experienced a debt crisis, requiring intervention (eg revaluing currency, revolution). More recently, Katarina Pistor wrote The Code of Capital, which documents the modern economy built on top of our shared legal fiction of property. Here's a pretty good interview. https://the-ezra-klein-show.simplecast.com/episodes/katharin... FYI, I'm not…
on “Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout” ↗I recently read a fantastic book called "The Code of Capital" by Katharina Pistor(https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178974/the-code-of-capital) that documents how lawyers use legal code to protect wealth. The author covers several types of assets,…
on “Ask HN: Blockchains to simplify contract language and open source data?” ↗…economics. She is hitting on themes I'd been struggling towards and does some excellent analysis and research. Transcript: <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...> Book: The Code of Capital (2019) <https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D936D0247CB138F23F157A7...> Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have just published The Big Myth, which looks at the selling of the notion of free markets, specifically…
on “California cancels salmon fishing season” ↗…forced to pay, legal experts say. > misunderstands limited and zero liability I find it hard to believe that "Katharina Pistor, Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, [and] author of The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality." understands the topic worse than an HN commenter. > pretending the former is the later I don't see that. For example, Pistor writes "The corporate entity…
on “Limited Liability Is Causing Unlimited Harm” ↗This is a book review of Katharina Pistor's "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality". The review is written by Adam Tooze, himself the author of the excellent "Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World" among others.
on “How ‘big law’ makes big money” ↗…protection against their own creditors. How did they pull off this trick? Through a nimble tangle of contracts, carefully and complicatedly applied, as Katharina Pistor explains in her lucid new book, The Code of Capital: by mixing “modern notions of individual property rights with feudalist restrictions on alienability”; by employing trusts “to protect family estates, but then [turning] around and [using] the trust again…
on “How ‘big law’ makes big money” ↗