6. Implement three advertisements and two sets of statistical analysis on rate of return and enterprise financing.

• Make the BVPS, book value per share, a disclosure obligation. This value is the quotient of dividing the capital, including reserves and retained earnings, by the number of shares, in other words by the number of shares¹²¹.

Françoise and François buy negotiable shares in company S. These shares have been held, since their issue, by at least one previous shareholder. The purchase price is €70 per share. How many of these €70 are exploited by company S? Perhaps anywhere from somewhat to very markedly less or more than the BVPS.

The concept of exploited capital holds both for negotiable shares and for refundable shares, cooperatives included. For listed shares, the BVPS contributes to cleaning up the market by serving as the basis for calculating the yield of holdings, this yield then becoming exactly comparable with that of unlisted negotiable shares and with that of refundable shares¹²².

• Make the DOE, dividend on equity, the counterpart of the TAEG, the overall effective annual rate of a credit. As the base 100 of the TAEG is the principal of the loan, the base 100 of the DOE is the BVPS (see above).

The TAEG, established by a European directive, now appears on advertisements and preliminary credit offers. Dividends will continue to be announced and paid without indicating a rate of return, as long as disclosure of the DOE has not likewise been made mandatory. The comparability of credit offers matters, hence the TAEG. The comparability of the rates of return on placements in share capital matters just as much, in order notably to provide for the coexistence and joint contribution of these placements, depending on whether they are in negotiable shares conferring the right to realize a capital gain on sale, or in refundable shares not conferring that right, but likewise able to be protected against monetary erosion, by means of the free distribution of shares following a balance-sheet revaluation.

• Make the ER, equity ratio, a disclosure that every commercial or civil company¹²³ must carry out. The opening balance sheets of a financial year summarize enterprises’ financial situations at those dates.

From one financial-year opening to the next, an enterprise’s financial situation is new, even if it differs little from the previous year’s opening. Among what characterizes this situation is, notably, the ratio between the net position, in other words the top of the balance sheet on the liabilities side, and total liabilities, the sum of the net position and all debts¹²⁴. It is this ratio that we call the equity ratio.

No absolute value is significant of the structure of an enterprise’s financing. This is why disclosing the amount of capital is not significant. It becomes much more so, for creditors and all other suppliers — including shareholders and employees — when it is accompanied by disclosure of the equity ratio.

• The DOE lend themselves to statistical analysis. Let us not enter here into the specification of such an analysis, but let us note that two of its results can and must be: 1) what is called, in Chapter 10 of the first propositions of economic science, the national average rate of profit (NARP); 2) its evolution over time, correlated with the variation in the unemployment rate.

These two results, and others wholly or partly from the same source, are part of what sound economic policy requires to be made, or kept, public — ensuring that the media relay this information, as long as it is judged too specialized to reach the general public. Abstaining from this is systemically at fault. Such abstention means, in effect, the absence of any will to let the most important profit rate, the DOE, play its full role as: 1) a stimulator and director of placements of savings in capital; 2) a regulator of the prices at which enterprises sell, these prices being acts of commutative justice only when they have the effect of constantly reducing the rates of return of the same systemic level¹²⁵. Entrepreneurship, when it advises against activating these stimulations, orientations, and regulations, takes account only of its own interests and habits. The general interest commands all the more that they be overridden, since doing so makes the general course of business better assured and the level of structural unemployment lower.

• The ER lend themselves to statistical analysis. Let us not enter here into the specification of such an analysis, but let us note that two of its results can and must be: 1) what is called, in Chapter 10 of the first propositions of economic science, the national average equity ratio (NAER); 2) its evolution over time, likewise correlated with the variation in the unemployment rate.

These macro-results are likewise part of what sound economic policy requires to be made, or kept, public — ensuring that the media relay this information, as long as it is judged too specialized to reach the general public. Here too, not using this instrument of economic policy is systemically at fault. A rise in the national stock of capital weaker than that of enterprises’ indebtedness is not only financially dangerous but also unfavorable to raising the stock of lasting jobs. Employee unions serve their members more than their possible ideological biases when they push for a rise in the national average equity ratio, with all the less aversion to a rise in the mass of dividends as the mass of enterprises’ financial charges will thereby be reduced and the mass of wages, initially not penalized, will rise even faster than that of placement income¹²⁶.