And the thing about unproductive capital is that its value always goes to zero in the end.

It will, consequently, always be a vacuum for economically unproductive capital.

You have speculators and unproductive capital that flee the country whenever they can.

The company maintains that $10bn of that unproductive capital will start producing in 2013.

Finally, it leads to the production of what are at best unproductive capital goods and what are usually unaffordable (else why the artificially cheap loan?)

These involve years of spending on costly infrastructure, which means a lot of unproductive capital sitting on their balance sheet for years, not earning any returns.

"In the major restructuring of U.S. corporations, we've written off a substantial amount of unproductive capital," Mr. Reuss said.

However, the initial impact of economic reform often appears to make things worse as unproductive capital is closed down and labour is shed, and this needs to be offset by slacker monetary policy.

Mr Whall of Investec says Shell made "too big a bet" on American unconventionals, and had too much unproductive capital tied up in big projects that were not progressing.

First, if any part of his capital took the form of unproductive inventories, unsold goods, etc., whose value would otherwise dissipate over time, then an additional customer calls a portion of this unused and hence unproductive capital into activity.