Financialization as a Theory of Crisis in a Historical Perspective: Nothing New under the Sun

This working paper carries out a conceptualization of the so-called group of “financialization” approaches for the crisis phenomena. It succinctly defines the meaning of the theories of crisis in relation to the limits of the reproduction of the capitalist system. The crisis can be considered certain, as a necessary moment of the accumulation process, or just a mere possibility. In this latter case, it is considered that the free operation of the market tends to equilibrium, or alternatively, that an appropriate management of economic policy is able to avoid the crisis. One way or another, these approaches share the idea that, under certain conditions, the capitalism can reproduce itself indefinitely, so the hypotheses of this article will be that the approaches of financialization support a theory of possibility of the crisis.