The market economy has undergone a profound transformation in the last decades, at first in a silent way and then with a remarkable roar. In today's capitalism, three novel features stand out. The first is the ultrafinancial dimension, with capital markets located beyond any reasonable scale. The second,
growing inequality, which creates threats to some of the great progress that advanced societies made in the middle of the last century. And the third, a dynamic of internationalization
It opens new paths for prosperity, but also great risks, mainly due to its very unbalanced composition.
These three features, which are closely related to each other, were exacerbated after the explosion of the great financial crisis of 2008.
But they also then showed their multiple and intricate contradictions. And not only in the strictly economic sphere, where the possibility of slow growth in a long-term perspective has become increasingly plausible. There are also notable questions for the future of democracy, since the logic of the markets and that of democratic politics move in different directions. And in relation to all this, there is also a threat to the project
of European integration, since the fundamental economic transformation has ended up showing the structural deficiencies on which that
project was designed. In this book, Xosé Carlos Arias and Antón Costas
they study in detail the main ideas and the succession of events that are contributing to the formation of a new skin of capitalism.