As the ongoing financial crisis is accelerating, we rise to all sorts of explanations of why the U.S. financial deterioration could not be contained, and why the economic recession in that country now it threatens to become global economic recession. Until recently, the chorus of official spokespeople flatly denied that this could occur. Still, the structural foundations of the unfolding crisis remain hidden, as if ignoring them would give a break to those who are looking for ways to "restore" balance. Within
structural phenomena more relevant today is the unprecedented increase in world trade of fictitious capital during the past decades. This has allowed debt levels are also unusual, not only states but also to businesses, households and individuals.
giving samples of a degree of socialization of economic relations unthinkable a few decades, global capitalism gave way to the production and trade of the most exotic forms of capital symbols. Most pension funds and other funds are "deposited" into such roles. Material wealth was replaced by legal relationships of indebtedness. In many countries, people even went into debt to buy symbolic capital and share in the gains offered by trade. The process was very dynamic during the last decade, symbolized by the paper value of fictitious capital grew much faster than the real economy. Until the beginning of the current crisis, that value was more than five times the world output, ie the value of everything produced annually in the world in goods and services.
Thus, it was creating an imbalance between the nominal value of fictitious capital papers circulating in the world and the real capacity of the economy world to produce equivalent values. The rate of real capital accumulation has been well below the rate of accumulation of fictitious capital. The reality has distanced itself from fiction so that even the most deluded people have begun to doubt the values \u200b\u200bof the roles that symbolizes wealth. Time trying to get rid of them, have caused the collapse of various financial market segments worldwide. Even the most blatant maneuvers rating agencies have been prevented.
The serious problem is that it has begun a widespread devaluation of existing fictitious capital. It says so there has been an over-accumulation of fictitious capital, and subacumulación real capital. The losses are now suffering banks, funds and other institutional investors, and as a result the people are the result of this over-accumulation of fictitious capital. Some bankers and "investors" have discovered with astonishment that today many of the roles of symbolic capital are priceless. Therefore, the strategy of rescue of Citibank, based on creating a fictitious price for fictional roles, has failed miserably, despite the massive cash injections by central banks in the U.S. and the Eurozone.
The over-accumulation of fictitious capital has a double effect, which threatens to deepen. On the one hand, detract from many of the roles symbolic capital in circulation, causing losses that could blow over any of the major international banks. On the other, making it increasingly difficult to finance fiscal and trade deficits by issuing new equity symbolic roles.
Therefore, it is entirely illusory idea that the current financial crisis could be confined to certain countries, eg U.S. World trade necessarily be affected, unless that is supposed possible to establish a fully balanced world trade, but dynamic, excluding U.S. This is simply absurd vision of those who make merry with accounts international reserves accumulated in the "emerging economies" in recent years.
The current financial crisis is structural and global. Capitalist socialization, however much progress has been made does not exceed the limitations of an economic system based, ultimately, not in the collective interest, but individual. Pretending that nations are better prepared "to deal with it, is to ignore their structural nature. Pretender coping with individual state action, is to ignore its global nature. The answer to the crisis should be both structural and global. But it is clear that lack the institutions to even conceive of a response of that nature.
Alexander Schubert, an economist and political scientist.
