JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ISSUES Vol. L No. 3 September 2016 DOI 10.1080/00213624.2016.1210384 Dirk Bezemer and Michael Hudson Dirk Bezemer is a professor of economics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Michael Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a professor at Peking University. The authors thank the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions that greatly improved this article. Bezemer wishes to thank the Equilibrio Foundation and the Institute for New Economic Thinking for financial support. Any remaining errors are the authors’ own. Abstract: Conflation of real capital with finance capital is at the heart of current misunderstandings of economic crisis and recession. We ground this distinction in the classical analysis of rent and the difference between productive and unproductive credit. We then ...