Résumé en anglais

This article adresses the issue of the economic irrationality, political unreasonableness, and social unsustenability of financial globalization. Firstly it tackles the reasons for breaking off with financial globalization that can be inferred from its self-referential functioning which has been revealed by its current crisis. On the one hand it shows that the neoliberal globalization of finance is a not viable substitute to a cooperative political organization of the international monetary system. On the other hand it displays that globalized finance is not efficient in the effectuation of the economic function which rationally justifies its existence, that is funding the productive economy. Secondly it examines three main reasons to go out from financial globalization that are not raised by its proper logic, but are underlying it and testify to a deep crisis of democracy. The first is that financial globalization is supported by national economic regimes of restriction of the wage purchasing power, which lead to a generalized indebtedness of the great majority of the people, and therefore to a new mode of social domination that threatens the social balance of our societies and their democratic characters. The second reason is the «repression» of the monetary power of the States, the financial globalization being mainly supported by national regimes of monopolization of money issuance by private commercial banks. This «monetary repression» leads public authorities into debt vis-à-vis globalized finance in a cumulative way, so engendering growing public debt burden and fiscal deficit which drive States and local authorities to cut their expenditures for social and public services. Thus supposedly democratic public powers are now put under the domination of a cosmopolitan financial aristocracy. The third reason is that financial globalization is supported by an international regime of ideas which has been established in the United States from 1970s on, and claims to universal validity by leaning on the scientificity of financial science and the rationality of new classical macroeconomics. Yet this ideological regime is based on false hypotheses, and is more a matter of religious belief than of scientific rationality. The erroneous character of these hypotheses explains the repeated financial crises and proves again in the necessity of going out from financial globalization. The conclusion sums up the multiple reasons which justify our general argument considering that breaking off with financial globalization is a necessary condition to exit from the current crisis.