This is of course the purpose of the holiday

Change air... This is of course the purpose of the holiday. This summer, it is was therefore left attempt, between of best-selling, Italian novel, two Murakami and some recent tests, through a history book which featured the double advantage of having a news title "The dynamics of capitalism" (1) and a number of reassuring pages, just 120. Fernand Braudel presents the findings of its "material culture, economy and capitalism, 15th - 18th century". This major work having published some thirty years ago, no risk to find echoes of this mad crisis of the "sub-prime" us obsession for more than a year. Las! This was without counting the genius of the great historian, disappeared in 1985.

In France, the "sub-prime" crisis and the procession of disasters which follows banks into bankruptcy, real estate dried up, economies in recession is most often interpreted as a new proof of the failure of the market. One of the "sub-prime", "securitized" products, raw materials... The key to reading is almost naturally in a country where it defies market. In 2005, only 36 of the French felt that free enterprise and the market economy were the best system on which to base the future of the world, by far the lowest proportion among 20 countries, including the most developed but also China, Nigeria, or the Brazil. And there is little reason that opinions were much moved in three years.

But we have not experienced a crisis in the market. On the contrary is when the market disappeared the crisis began. It has become so impossible to determine the prices of many financial products. To clean up their accounts, investors sold tiny amounts of these products at broken prices. These tiny sales had a tremendous effect, because the new accounting rules require bankers, insurers and other heads of company to evaluate their assets not at the price at which he had purchased, but the "fair value". As there is no thermometer at "fair value", it is the last transaction which determines this "fair value", even if it is not a market where a lot of vendors and a host of buyers meet. This is why bankers have had to devalue their assets by hundreds of billions of euros.

Modern finance, it is the decline in the market, not its advance. Actions, for example, more and more escape him. They are in the hands of the "private equity", family businesses or sovereign wealth funds. The obligations also: in recent years, financial institutions have preferred different all sophisticated products with each other, whose prices are established by mathematical models and not by the market.

Do you have difficulty understanding This is normal, even the financiers have nothing understood. Depart of the middle ages with Braudel: "English historians reported, from the 15th century, the growing importance, near the public market traditional the"public market" of what they named the"private market", the market private;" I would gladly, to emphasize the difference, the contre-marché. Is it not, indeed, to get rid of the rules of the traditional market, often crippling to the excess "Exactly what happened in finance in recent years, where banks were placed out of their balance sheets risks that clogging them for centuries, transforming them in financial securities CDOS, MBSS and all this theory of products in three or four letters.

Braudel specific comments on these traders invent this market private by purchasing "wool before the shearing of sheep, wheat while in grass": "this type of Exchange overrides the normal conditions of the labour market of individual transactions, including the terms arbitrarily vary depending on the situation of the interested parties ...." It exchanges unequal competition essential Act of the so-called "market" economy has little place, where the merchant has broken the chains between the producer and who is ultimately for the good .... Thus long market chains tend between production and consumption. "In the case of the"subprime", a long string stretched between the American who borrows for his home and the investor who buys a slice of credits: broker, banker, financial aggregate loans, sale as financial title, sometimes new crossing at the plant, then purchase by an investor who knows anymore as it has acquired.

These strings are not harmful in nature, on the contrary: "it is certainly their effectiveness that imposed them ...". "and that has prompted the authorities to close the eyes, at least to loosen their control", just as the miracles of securitization released the vigilance of the United States Federal Reserve. Braudel explains that the economic advance of Europe in the Renaissance came from "the superiority of its instruments and institutions: Awards and the various forms of credit." The historian gives a different name to these institutions, the contre-marché, these "upper floors of the Exchange", the "zone of high profit": capitalism (2). Fernand Braudel also regrets "not as a historian, but as a man of my time" as the "denied to distinguish between capitalism and market economy".

The so-called "sub-prime" crisis is not a crisis of the market, competition, transparency. But rather a crisis of capitalism and what it allows, "the monopoly of law or of fact, the manipulation of prices". This is essential. First because the current crisis shows need to change the rules of the game. Public authorities (Governments and regulators) must intervene. But they know better to do in capitalism the market. If the market needs a legal basis, "capitalism needs a hierarchy", as says Braudel. Then because capitalism is reborn from the ashes: "yesterday as today, its characteristic and strength are able to move from a ruse to another, from one action to another form, change ten times its batteries according to the circumstances of the situation and, to stay fairly faithful, quite similar to himself."