Финансијализација као узрочник и мултипликатор кризе

The paper deals with financialization as a process of converting financial capital into fictive and virtual capital, and its separation from the real, productive sphere. It points to the enormous growth of the financial sector during the last decades of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, and the increasing dispersal of financial instruments as a consequence of financial innovations whose purpose, among other things, is to avoid the effects of state regulatory measures, resulting in their growing influence on movements in the real and the financial sphere and on the creation of conditions for the appearance of financial crises. Contemporary recessions, such as the one that broke out in 2007, have very little in common with standard cyclical fluctuations to which Schumpeter referred as «creative destruction». They are not influenced by fluctuations in the real sphere but are, rather, a product of the above-described processes of separation of the financial and the real sphere, which has grown too weak to sustain the huge financial superstructure that has been erected over it. The convergence of financial capital with corporations and the state has resulted in the consolidation of a powerful mass of oligarchic capital, embodied in the Wall Street – U. S. Department of Finance – IMF triad, which de facto holds the financial, economic and political power in the U.S. and the world. In that sense, all talk about regulation and deregulation becomes irrelevant, as the current crisis has shown: the processes of financialization prepared the way for the onset of the crisis, while regulative and other state measures can only (re)direct huge financial flows and control the timing and dosage of the strength of the crisis.