CAPITAL. — Capital is a good that is saved (not consumed) and used for further production. For an enterprise, every good, whether material or immaterial, applied to the production process—including any contribution of labor—entails an expense of capital.
Thus, capital in monetary form is a potential aggregate of production tools. A distinction is made between fixed capital, capable of repeated use and whose cost can be spread over multiple accounting periods (depreciation), and circulating capital, which is exhausted within a single production process. Capital is indispensable for the production of any material good and nearly every immaterial service. The productivity of production processes is closely tied to the availability of capital, which in turn depends on the availability of real income and thus on the level of previous production, as well as on the population’s propensity to save. Therefore, the formation of capital is largely linked to the shifting and difficult-to-schematize and predict individual decisions. Banks can only partially correct this phenomenon through the manipulation of deposit interest rates; they themselves can create credit—that is, monetary capital—only insofar as there is a suitable opportunity for them to contribute, through financing, to the preformation of incomes in enterprises, incomes that will become substantial only with the sale of the products thus obtained.
The creation of capital by credit institutions is therefore limited by the state of business and by the maintenance of a given coverage ratio between bank money, issued to mobilize credit-based capital granted to enterprises, and liquid assets available to meet check payments.
A production process is more or less capital-intensive depending on whether it employs greater or lesser quantities of capital goods; usually, the adoption of a highly capital-intensive production process means lengthening the interval between the start and completion of the process, while temporarily reducing the availability of consumer goods. However, this phenomenon does not occur when technological innovations allow capital goods to be used in smaller quantities to achieve the same output.
Just as a single production process can, so too can a nation, considered as a single enterprise, enjoy a higher overall real income when it has abundant technical capital—that is, productive factors other than labor. Moreover, as the productivity of labor—increasing up to a certain limit—grows with the amount of capital that can be combined with labor in production processes, wages can correspondingly rise. Therefore, a large availability of capital is the starting point for achieving a high national real income and high labor incomes.
CAPITAL, WRITING. —
I. IN EPIGRAPHY
When applied to writing, the term "capital" means "larger" or "more prominent," as in the letters used in the *capita* of pages and treatises. It is not a term used in ancient Latin. In technical language, however, it is not synonymous with "uppercase," but rather designates that form of writing found on the oldest stone monuments and still essentially reproduced in the uppercase of modern printed fonts. In this sense, it contrasts with both cursive and lowercase scripts, as well as with uncial.It appears that originally only one type of writing was in use among each people, whether Greek or Italic, with alphabets that the Greeks derived from the Semites and the Italics from their Greek neighbors in the Chalcidian colonies (Cumae, Naples, etc.). Certainly, all the oldest written texts show the same type of letters, which are essentially those referred to above as *capitale*.
Greek *capital* writing underwent little evolution in its forms, with only rounded variants appearing alongside the square forms from the 3rd–2nd centuries B.C., forms that might be called uncial.
Latin *capital* writing, from its earliest form (archaic *capital*), gradually refined its strokes, so that by the time of Augustus it presents a noble, severe, and elegant type, in which the letter forms are perfectly stabilized. This type has two fundamental variants: the *square* or *monumental* and the *actuaria* or *rustic* capital.