A financialized monetary economy of production

Interpreting the 2007 crisis as the result of a malfunctioning of financial markets is wrong: as André Orléan wrote, it is not due to the fact that the financial rules were circumvented, but by the fact that they were followed (Orléan 2009). Securitization can be interpreted as the last stage of profound transformation of financial systems began in the late 1970s, and it is con- nected with the shift of US monetary policy in October 1979. The low level of wages, and the consequent under-consumption, is not the unique cause of the crisis. Financialization is not only limited in changing behavior of consumer- savers; the investments have also changed. Particularly during the 1990s, as the new industrial technology favored its own sort of financing. This trend, mutatis mutandis, seems to reflect the same dynamics studied by Joseph Alois Schumpeter about railroadization in the nineteenth century in his Business Cycles (1989: 215–231). As affirmed by Antonelli (2009), the big crisis began when interest rates reported relative to their normal levels did not allow the survival of marginal activities. The over-financed leverage may be better understood starting from the 1990s technological paradigm. After the so-called internet bubble burst, something remained (for example, new large companies as Microsoft and Apple). The stock-market crash of 2000–2002 did not really stop American growth and was not interpreted as a proof of financial fragility. The financial bubble was delayed and contained mainly by Fed monetary policy. The monetary theory of production offers a systemic approach to avert systemic crises; but it needs to be modified. Faced with post-Fordist capital- ism, scholars are seeking to address this challenge. In accordance with the Schumpeterian perspective, we propose to emphasize within the circuitist approach both the monetary nature and the qualitative change of the capitalist system, in order to explore the profound transformation of the antagonistic relation of capital to labor related to the development of an economy founded on knowledge as its driving force.