ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, in parallel with the globalisation process, a process of financialisation of the economy in advanced economies took place. Financialisation is defined in several ways by scholars from the political sciences, sociology and economics. Most of these definitions, however, converge towards the identification of the financialisation process in a political economy phenomenon where there is a growing dominance of capital financial systems over bank-based financial systems (Krippner, 2005), or more broadly, the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of domestic and international economies (Epstein, 2005: 3-4). This process culminated, according to the Bank for International Settlements, in about 2 trillion dollars each day of volume of foreign exchange transactions in 2006, just before the crisis. This is more or less the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country the size of France. In contrast, in 1989, this volume was about 500 billion dollars per day.
