L’évaluation de la crise des subprimes et les limites du capitalisme spéculatif

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it interprets the subprime crisis as the latest crisis of Anglo-American speculative capitalism. On the other, it shows why speculative capitalism is now confronting limits which will put an end to its paradigm or will alter it deeply. The analysis highlights that the subprime crisis resulted from the way the American securities markets are structured and that it was specifically the product of the stock market (as opposed to stock exchanges), its less regulated and most speculative part. It shows that speculative capitalism “disembeds” finance from the economy just as the economy was disembedded from society during the industrial revolution (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). It suggests that a third disembedding process, that of the “world” out of the “earth” (Arendt, 1998), has come into play and that it will impose limits to the limitless ambitions of speculative capitalism, thereby debasing it as a model for global capitalism.

Keywords

• speculation
• stock market
• speculative capitalism
• stock exchange
• subprime crisis
• paradigm