Update: Many readers and other people who have seen this quote making the rounds on Wall Street believe it is a hoax.

Hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson sends out wonderful e-mails about every day. I just got a new one today, and he included this incredible quote from Karl Marx:

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. (Das Kapital, 1867)

What does it all mean? I'm not really sure. But Karl Marx's theory that capitalism would inevitably lead to communism has mostly been dismissed -- proven wrong by the survival of capitalism and the fall of communism.

And while it is true that there was a fat lady singing at Obama's inauguration (she was great by the way -- just sayin'), Karl Marx may still have the last word yet.

Of course some Republicans will point to Obama as a step toward socialism. So does that mean Marx was right?

From the 'what goes around comes around' department: publishers in Germany are reporting that interest in the ideas of Karl Marx is surging.

Small academic publisher the Karl-Dietz Verlag, has sold 1,500 copies of Marx's Das Kapital, including 200 in September alone. Other book stores have seen sales of the classic and deadly dull tome skyrocket by 300%. I realize that these figures are not indicative of a best-seller in the order of the Da Vinci Code, but they are interesting nonetheless.

The current economic meltdown has up-ended people's notions of capitalism. Conservatives have derided the $700 billion rescue of Wall Street as socialism. In many ways, they are right. The government is intervening in the market and choosing winners and losers, something that was never supposed to happen under the free market.

Though I have not seen any figures, I bet that interest in Marx is probably increasing in the United States as well. This may shock many investor,s but many people have grown increasingly anxious every time they view their 401 (k). The American dream has turned into a nightmare for many people struggling to pay their bills and facing foreclosure.

For some people, Marx seems to offer people the answers they are seeking. His ideas have been discredited by decades of often-brutal history of countries that lived under Communism. It's no accident that the United States won the Cold War.