THE WORLD ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CRISIS KEYNES VERSUS FRIEDMAN? OSCILLATIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC ETHICS AND THE SPECULATION ECONOMY

In his famous work “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, released in London in 1936, John Maynard Keynes was critically referring to an essential tenet of the capitalism of his times - significantly amplified in the capitalism of out times - namely “The Love of Money”. The confrontation between an ethic characterized more by its absence, and a genuine ethic, closer to a moral economy in the Christian meaning of the word has never been harsher or more obvious, with an clear tilt towards the former, in particular the exaggerated love of money - writes another outstanding philosopher of economics, Jean Paul Fitoussi. Such a positioning, Fitoussi was showing, a positioning which is quite lame, has led to such extremes as extravagant wages and incomes for the wealthy, often low social and sometimes even productive yields, of a chimerical type, in negatives, the extension not only of misery but also of its obscenities, the exploitation of inequities, the extreme degradation of the environment, etc. “Could the current emergence of a certain moral ethic be a reaction to a spectacle grieved by the economic and social consequences of an unethical economic world?” the author mentioned before was also wondering. And the answer is bound to be positive, the arguments not being easy to dismiss…crisis, economic ethics, capitalism