Trade Control models commerce not as a neutral exchange, but as a layered interface between production and financial abstraction. It separates this interface into two domains: Industrial Capitalism1, which orchestrates production through engineering and supply chains, and Financial Capitalism2, which territorialises rights through asset-layer projection.
Industrial Capitalism emerged from the fusion of engineering workflows and market orchestration during the Industrial Revolution. It is defined by two mechanisms:
This duality splits the market into two domains:
Trade Control exposes the tension between these domains by modelling price discovery as a schema-native process. It reveals that:
To resolve this, Trade Control introduces Gestalt Costing5—a schema-native method rooted in the Production Layer and Supply-and-Demand recording surface. It enables:
Industrial Capitalism is not inherently exponential. It grows only when Consumer Price fails to finance innovation. Producer Price then steps in, creating a feedback loop of investment, extraction, and eventual deflation. This loop is finite, because it is tied to the limits of production.
Financial Capitalism is not a natural evolution of industrial logic—it is a negative feedback loop that extracts rights from production and concentrates them in the Asset Layer.
The turning point came in 1986 with the UK’s Big Bang, when the London Stock Exchange was deregulated and digitised. Sir Nicholas Goodison, then chairman, declared:
“We must never lose sight of that prime purpose of a stock market, which is to serve industry…”
Instead, the LSE became a laboratory for financial instruments. Capital debt outstripped equity, and the industrial base was hollowed out.
Trade Control traces this transformation through three stages:
Each stage reflects a deeper territorialisation of rights. Capital debt becomes a mechanism for ceaseless growth and extraction. The debtor must pay both principal and interest, siphoning capital from the balance sheet into the coffers of the creditor.
Banks, hedge funds, and asset managers are capitalist entities too. Their balance sheets are owned externally, and their capital is declared like any other. Financialisation is not neutral—it is a technique for enriching owners and their portfolios.
Money creation is not just debt issuance—it is territorial projection. Finite territory (property, land) bestows rights to legislate and extract. Infinite territory (the future) is created by issuing finite debt via fiat. Central banks inflate the money supply against this imagined future, but the burden eventually exceeds the bearing capacity of the present6.
Trade Control models this as a unitary projection—a force field that must be maintained through coercion. When debts can no longer be paid, the system defaults to violence: military force, plunder, or systemic collapse. The Production Layer, with its recursive workflows and ecological logic, is the opposite of this arrangement.
Even the vast derivatives and bond markets are ultimately credited against the Production Layer. Every tradable asset depends on capital that must be serviced through wages, which are liabilities. As financial markets are privatised, the many below the Asset Layer become indebted to the few above it—infinitely.
One endgame is a return to finitude7: crypto replacing gold, rights reallocated through mathematically enforced scarcity. Trade Control does not endorse this nightmare—it models, exposes, and seeks alternatives rooted in productive agency.
Trade Control separates commerce into industrial and financial domains, exposing the layered logic of production and extraction. It models price discovery, capital creation, and asset projection as schema-native processes. By calculating capital from a mentality that is not of it, Trade Control de-territorialises the financial interface and restores agency to production.
