Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits

This book provides an original account of financialisation and outlines the creation of fictitious profits as a basis to describe the present phase of capitalist accumulation in the neoliberal era. Making innovative theoretical elaborations on Marx's notion of fictitious capital, Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits offers a dialectic analysis of the increasing financialization during this crisis-ridden period based on the original concepts of fictitious profit and fictitious wealth.Combining the most important research from over twenty years of scholarly inquiry with groundbreaking new studies, Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits is more than a collection of texts by political economists on a contemporary topic; it is a synthesis of an intense process of academic production that began with work of Karl Marx and has resulted in the formulation of a differentiated interpretative perspective on the contemporaryevolution of capitalist crisis.

Autorentext

Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello is Professor in the Department of Economics and the Post-Graduate Programme in Social Policy at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil

Mauricio de Souza Sabadini is Professor in the Department of Economics and the Post-Graduate Programme in Social Policy at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil

Inhalt

1. Chapter 1. Introduction

2. Chapter 2. The place of money in Marx's theory of capital

Introduction Money in Marx's intellectual pathway to capital

The saga of chapter three: money as the antecessor of capital

The category money in Capital Final considerations

3. Chapter 3. Speculative Capital And The Dematerialisation Of Money

Introduction

On the concept of parasitic speculative capital Redundancy, contamination and a new concept

Exaggerated conclusions, speculative capital and fictitious remuneration

On the nature of money

Money and credit money Credit money and measures of value

Reformulating the thesis From the simple equivalent to money in Marx

Money and gold 4. Chapter 4. Crypto-Currencies: From the Fetishism of Gold To Hayek Gold

Introduction

Crypto-currencies The creation and circulation of Bitcoin Can bitcoin assume the functions of money in capitalism?

Measurement of values

Means of circulation Money itself

Money as capital The crypto-currencies, their theological mantras and their ideological underpinnings

Final Considerations 5. Chapter 5. Financialisation and the contradictory unity between the real and financial dimensions of capital accumulation

&a...