ABSTRACT
Nothing is more challenging for economists than understanding structural change while it is altering the core macroeconomic relationship of a growth regime. It is even more daunting while it is encompassing the world economy at large. However, this is what has been unleashed by the global financial crisis that erupted in 2007 and spread well beyond its origin in the US. The impact of the crisis has reverberated all over the world. Furthermore it has posed hard questions about the intellectual paradigm that has legitimated the dominance of financial capitalism since its rise in the 1980s and its expansion beyond the Western world in the 1990s. The collapse of financial markets in the fall of 2008 has not only demonstrated once more their incapacity for self-regulation, it has also raised doubts about the incentives provided by finance to economic agents according to the so-called Wall Street model.
