Acessibilidade / Reportar erro

Fictitious capital and economic crisis: visions towards a new paradigm

ABSTRACT

This article has the purpose on defining fictitious capital theoretically and questioning its role on economic orthodox narratives. Its secondary goal is to demonstrate the harmful effects of such capital in Brazil. Fictitious capital is all rental obtained for the artificial and derivative valuation of invested capital without correspondence to production. Its massive presence signals an internal contradiction on current capitalism, even though conventional thinking still believes that crisis comes from exogenous and unexpected events. Actually, crisis occurs not by random but, indeed, through the dissociation between the circulationand the production process, which allows its offspring. The first part of this paper analyses basic aspects of the value theo­ry and fictitious capital as expressed by Marx and the heterodoxy; the second part deals with the Brazilian case and questions the irrevocable 'Faith' that orthodoxy has on crises' narratives supposedly sprung from models of equilibrium.

Keywords:
fictitious capital; heterodoxy; crises; economical theory.

Instituto de Economia da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Avenida Pasteur, 250 sala 114, Palácio Universitário, Instituto de Economia, 22290-240 Rio de Janeiro - RJ Brasil, Tel.: 55 21 3938-5242 - Rio de Janeiro - RJ - Brazil
E-mail: rec@ie.ufrj.br