The Recent international financial CRISIS, which begun in the middle of 2007 with the elevations of the default on the high risk mortgages (subprime) in the United States, assumed systemic outlines with Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in September 2008. Its reflexed were felt in the whole world, raising successive public interventions in order to guarantee the bank solvency and to lessen the recessive impacts of the abrupt reduction of the credit. But it has equally renewed the discussion on the “financialized” character of the operations performed by remarkably productive companies, which took advantage of extremely complex instruments in the search for supplemental earnings resulting from the financial leverage.
In this crisis, the search for high financial earnings showed its consequences in a more overwhelming way, on what concerns both the risks (and losses) to which the corporations were exposed and the macroeconomic impacts provoked by its magnitude in a context of deep risk aversion. Such debate, in spite of still incipient, began with the disclosure of the negative results of several productive companies from emerging economies, resulting from operations with financial derivatives in the exchange market. Based on what is known in the moment, that process reached companies, in different degrees, the great international banks are present and many of those companies alleged they have been deceived by them in establishing asymmetrical contracts of derivatives. In Brazil, national financial institutions also participated in the movement, differently, for instance, of Mexico, whose banking sector in dominated by international players.