GABRIEL QUATROCHI’s research while affiliated with State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and other places

The article aims to show how financialization intensifies the subordination of peripheral economies in relation to the central ones, focusing on Brazil. Financialization is defined as a systemic pattern of wealth, driven by financial liberalization after the collapse of Bretton Woods. The integration of peripheral economies into this hierarchical global market of currencies and financial assets occurs unequally, with peripheral countries attracting speculative capital through high interest rates and deregulation. The article analyzes the process of financialization in Brazil since the 1980s, proposing a periodization that reveals how Brazil's economic structure consolidated a specific type of financialization.

The transformations brought by Industry 4.0 are many and comprehending their manifestations in the financial sector sounds mandatory to understand the new financing possibilities and, on the threshold, the very future of the sector. So far, the Brazilian reality in the banking sector includes fintechs, digital banks and open banking, all of which represent the deep transformations underway in the country’s credit market. But to what extent can these emerging outsiders effectively fulfil this financing role in the Brazilian context? From a neo-Schumpeterian approach, the aim of this study was to describe the main 4.0 technological trajectories and its new agents in the Brazilian banking sector, as well as the competitive strategies of the well-established incumbent banks, to understand how competitive conditions can ensure the market permanence of fintechs. Through an analytical overview, this based on a rigorous qualitative analysis of publications and available data, our study suggests that advances of the national regulatory framework for fintechs are a first-order recommendation if the objective is to really ensure the financial strength and liquidity both needed for these new players. In this context, the regulatory sandboxes can play an important role.

The aim of this paper is demonstrate how financialization contributes to deepening the centerperiphery relationship and how it gains singular contours when expressed in peripheral countries, with emphasis on Brazil. For such, the definition of financialization as a systemic pattern of wealth is initially constructed and how neoliberal policies originated from the collapse of Bretton Woods function as a tool for this new pattern of accumulation. Based on this, the article seeks to consolidate the argument by relating the changing role of the State under neoliberalism, focusing on changes in the Brazilian economic structure since the 1990s and how this contributes to consolidating a particular type of financialization in the Brazil. As a consequence, the construction of growth regimes completely associated with financial profitability and the loss of the autonomy of economic policy.