The real economy emerge of course not free

The crisis opened more than a year ago overflowed only credit field. It is extended to most capital markets: equity, mergers and acquisitions, introductions in the stock market and even, in some countries, creation of business. The real economy emerge of course not free. Globalization has produced its first global crisis. It can be interpreted in terms of economic capital, provided they give the concept a broad meaning.

In 2005, the World Bank had provided a comprehensive assessment of the "productive capital" of the world (1). In such an assessment, the financial capital disappears by compensation, claims of each being cancelled by the debts of others. But taken productive capital account by economists remains however of extreme diversity and goes far beyond the records of the national accounts: it certainly includes the physical capital of our national accounts (business, housing, infrastructure), but also includes the endowment in natural resources of soil and subsoil, the "human heritage", which corresponds to the quantity and quality of available labourthe capital of "knowledge", which also goes far beyond the only R & D, finally institutional capital, which reflects the functioning more or less satisfying the political, economic and financial system without forgetting this expensive cultural capital once to Max Weber.

To estimate the global capital, experts from the World Bank have legitimately calculated present value in 2000 of the amounts of consumption that it allowed for a period sufficiently long, twenty-five years. Their calculation, it can make a global amount of productive heritage that would be included between 500 and 600 thousands of billions of dollars of fifteen to twenty times the global GDP in 2000 (at current exchange rates). Questionable, this figure is not a priori unreasonable. Moreover, what is interesting is less the total amount that the structure be, close and close, infer, less than 10 for natural resources, a little more than double for physical capital, some 40 institutional capital and the heritage of knowledge; the rest to the institutional and cultural capital.

Eight years later and in a context of crisis, things have clearly changed. The overall value of the productive heritage of the planet has indeed decreased because of the reduction of the growth forecasts of consumption imply the crisis of the real economy. At the same time, the major emerging countries still sustained growth, the value of natural resources grew much: their share in the total amount of productive capital thus increased significantly since the beginning of the century, at the expense of all other types of capital. They are thus trapped between a decline in overall value of productive capital in very sensitive and natural resources including the relative price increased very strongly.

Some causes of reflux of these capital can easily be identified. With respect to physical capital, the crisis makes us especially sensitive to the decline in the value of the residential heritage, but that of the equipment companies, certainly also, affected by declining production forecasts. If acting human capital and knowledge capital, they describe only a likely increase in the rate of obsolescence in less readable environment. In the value of institutional capital, it is certainly reduced the dysfunctions observed, for example, in the control of certain institutions of the financial sector. All movements, more or less erratic, which we are currently witnessing in financial markets only mirror the many adjustments is the world capital in the crisis.