ABSTRACT
In the last decades of the past century, the transactions executed by the financial system—and, above all, the incomes distributed by it—grew faster than the real economy. In the leading industrialized country, households, the government, and the economy as a whole accumulated unprecedented levels of indebtedness. With the tidal wave of liberalization, financial techniques and innovations became increasingly unscrupulous and opaque. At the beginning of the new century, financial fragility reached dangerous levels: the symptoms of a ‘disaster foretold’ were before everybody’s eyes.
