歴史的パースペクティブからみたサブプライム危機 : レギュラシオン学派からの分析

抄録

Within regulation theory the process of financialisation is defined by the hierarchical position of the financial system with respect to the other institutional forms, especially the wage labor nexus, inherited from the demise and crisis of fordism. Actually, financial liberalization, both at the domestic and international level, has triggered a cumulative flow of financial innovations, so powerful that they seemed to construct an unprecedented accumulation regime, finance led and directed towards households credit. Clearly financial innovations display quite distinctive features: they are the outcome of private profit strategies and they diffuse quite quickly since they are largely immaterial. Therefore financial innovations can have major consequences upon macroeconomic stability, due to the externalities in direction of the banking and monetary system. This has been occurring in the United States and United Kingdom that are the two main countries to explore the systemic crisis of a finance led accumulation regime. This crisis is then diffusing to the rest of the world due to the pervasiveness and overlapping of the new financial products, especially mortgage credit derivatives. This framework explains why so many experts should not have been caught by surprise when the subprime crisis burst out. They had argued that financial sophisticated products could overcome any obstacle to growth whatsoever: financing education, insuring against exchange rate crises, overcoming underdevelopment, fighting poverty at home and abroad. This dream of an omnipotent finance has been applied to the financing of real estate for the poorest fraction of the American population... in the context of a speculative bubble. The securitization of these mortgage loans has transferred the default risk to the entire financial system since the remuneration of financiers created strong incentives to overextend the volume of low grade credit, i.e. the subprimes. Consequently their crisis was the logical outcome this speculation and many previous episodes (the October 1987 stock market crash, the LTCM collapse, the Enron scandal, the internet bubble..) had made explicit all the ingredients of the collapse of the entire American financial system on September 2008. From a regulationnist point of view, this is an unprecedented mix a three crises. First a typical over accumulation in the real estate sector, that calls for a readjustment of price of houses. Second, the securitization has destroyed the very possibility of a correct valuation of risk and consequently of pricing highly complex derivatives: this is the novelty of the 2008 financial systemic crisis. Thirdly, the related freeze of the credit is putting an end to the very engine of American growth since the mid 80s, i.e. the permanent extension of credit to households as an alternative to income increases. Thus it is a major structural crisis, the unfolding of which remains quite uncertain: everything is up to the political strategies that will shape the interventions of public authorities. It is finally argued that it is possible and crucial to institute a social control over finance and especially an ex ante supervision of financial innovations. Until 2008, only the domination and arrogance of financiers were preventing such an aggornamiento, but the collapse of the naive belief about the superiority and viability of free markets opens a new epoch concerning the mutual relations between State, democracy and capitalism.