ABSTRACT
From the utilizing of gold coins in the nineteenth century to the present enormous volume of electronic transactions that are almost instantaneously carried out on a global basis, maintaining a permanent uneasiness in the volatility of assets, an unprecedented revolution has occurred in the status of money and, more generally, in every procedure of finance – becoming cyberfinance in a world defined by globalization. It is significant that one economist has counterposed a ‘symbol economy’ organized by combined movements of intangible transactions, which only has information for support, to a ‘real economy’ of goods and services that today only represents a small share of economic activity (Drucker, 1981: 8). According to the most recent estimates, the financial or ‘symbol economy’ is between thirty and fifty times larger than the ‘real economy’. For every dollar spent on something ‘real’ (a car, a bottle of wine, a haircut, and so on), $30 to $50 is spent on a bond, stock, futures, contract, or insurance policy (Kurtzman, 1993: 40).
