General Motors

21st Gerpisa International Colloquium

Proposal

The impact of the variable financialization in the collapse of General Motors Corporation of 2008.

The term financialization has several definitions and it has been treated in different ways. I make an initial classification which suggests authors who present it as a category where the macroeconomic level predominates through public economic policies, out of which, among many others, John Bellamy Foster’s proposal stands out:
If in the 1970s “the old structure of the economy, consisting of a production system served by a modest financial adjunct” still remained—Sweezy observed in 1995—by the end of the 1980s this “had given way to a new structure in which a greatly expanded financial sector had achieved a high degree of independence and sat on top of the underlying production system.” Stagnation and enormous financial speculation emerged as symbiotic aspects of the same deep-seated, irreversible economic impasse. lire la suite