Lessons from a crisis announced

Abstract

The author examines the reasons behind the current crisis and identifies two types: the immediate ones, related to the particularities adopted by the financial markets and the remote ones, tied to the cultural changes that followed the transition from industrial to financial capitalism. Among the immediate causes one finds the deregulation and lack of supervision the financial sector has been subjected to since the 1970s in the USA, the need to obtain ever increasing returns on investments generated by pension funds and the usage of models with assumptions and tools that, ultimately, underestimated risk.
The second group, the remote causes, is composed by those that changed the cultural framework of western society. The author sustains that the economic theories on human action have managed to influence it and that the paradigm of society is shifting towards one that does not include any other value other than efficiency, where the corporation is not seen as an association but as a mere merchandise.