在过去的20年里,可交易金融工具在数量、多样性和货币价值上均有几个数量级的增长。传统股票的数量和价值都有所增加,证券的增幅更大,因为在20世纪70年代出现了向证券化借贷的转向趋势。这也许是许多学者所说的“金融化”的最重要的进展。本文认为当这些资产作为货币资本发挥作用时,它们进入利润率的平均化过程。它们构成了资产阶级的一部分预付资本,因而应当被包括在利润率的分母中。至少在两个主要的世界性金融市场(英国和美国),新的利润率衡量方法揭示了自20世纪60年代后期以来,这些国家的利润率的一般的、系统的和不间断的下降。本文重新审视了马克思的相关著作中的利润率定义,发现马克思所定义的一般利润率,无论是在概念上还是在衡量方法上,都应包括金融工具。 Tradable financial instruments have experienced orders of magnitude growth in volume, diversity and monetary value over the past two decades. The number and value of traditional stocks have increased, and securities have risen even more because of the shift towards securitization lending in the 1970s. This is perhaps the most important development that many scholars call “financialization.” This paper argues that as these assets function as monetary capital, they enter the process of averaging profit margins. They form part of the bourgeois prepaid capital and should therefore be included in the denominator of the rate of profit. In at least two major global financial markets, the United Kingdom and the United States, the new measure of profitability reveals a general, systematic and uninterrupted decline in the rates of profit in these countries since the late 1960s. This paper reexamines the definition of profit margin in Marx’s related works and finds that the general profit rate defined by Marx should include financial instruments both in concept and measure.