Open Capital - About our Logo

The Mobius Strip symbolises the continuity inherent in a partnership - where everyone is "on the same side". It also illustrates the profound new approach within Open Capital to the underlying assumptions in relation to the legal property rights which underpin our current financial system.

We live in a world of capital "absolutes" - where the "twin peaks" of financial capital we know as Equity and Debt represent "absolute"/permanent (ie infinite duration) ownership of the assets and revenues of an enterprise while "Debt" represents an absolute but temporary (ie finite duration) conflicting claim over the same assets and revenues. Similarly for a capital asset such as land, "freehold" is an absolute/permanent claim over land while "leasehold" is temporary occupation for a defined period of time.

In both cases there is a discontinuity and conflict between these two absolute forms of property right which we could imagine as the two surfaces of a loop one side of which represents the "permanent" property right and the other the "temporary" property right.

A revenue-sharing "Capital Partnership" creates an entirely new form of property right consisting of use of capital for an indefinite period; ie a Capital User has the right of use/occupation for as long as he pays a rental consisting of a proportional share of the revenues produced from the Capital or Capital Asset. In the Open Capital model any rental paid before the due date automatically becomes Investment: while conversely rental may be paid in Equity instead of Money.

In a Capital Partnership therefore, revenues and capital are continuous and the result is the single "capital surface" represented by a Mobius Strip bearing the arrow of Time. Those interested in metaphysics will observe in the "uncertainty" of Open Capital the very profound concept in relation to the nature of reality with which physicists have been wrestling for a hundred years now since quantum mechanics was born.

Prevailing economic theory - based as it is on such "absolute" constructs and definitions - becomes entirely irrelevant when viewed through the lens of Open Capital. We may therefore question the basis in reality of all current strands of economics, and particularly the prevailing neo-liberal orthodoxy.