Inovações financeiras e crise: O capital fictício e seus desdobramentos

Abstract

The growing and ongoing acommulation of material wealth is a basic premise for the perpetuation of the capitalist system and its markets, bringing with it numerous particularities that have been ‒ and still are ‒ extensively explored by numerous authours, among them, the main reference to this work, Karl Marx, more particularly in his greatest economic work, The Capital. Different stages of capitalism are shaped by historical processes and, at the present time, it is widely argued that, from the 1970s, the world economy would have entered a new phase, with the recrudescense of the world of finance and financial accumulation. As of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, a deep crisis at the 1970s, the rise of neoliberal governments and the setting up of various financial innovations, capitalismo undergoes transformations that constitute a new phase. This fase being one of exacerbation of the logic of finance, financial speculation and financial engeenering that creates ficticious capital as a form of capital accumulation. Thus, analyzing the emergence of new terms of capitalism operation, there is a need to interpret this reality. Focusing on the Marxist category of “ficticious capital”, our aim is to analyse the movements of financial capitalism and the countless financial innovations that have emerged through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s. Finally, focusing on the financial Crisis of mortgage bonds, gestated in the United States from 2007-2008, we seek the contradictions and instabilities produced by the logic of financial accumulation.