The financial sector: Ten years after the North American Free Trade Agreement. What did we gain and what did we lose?

Abstract

Since the seventies, the imposition of deregulation of the financial sector has shown the dominion of the increasingly hegemonic economic sector. This relaxation created the conditions for financial innovations aimed at increasingly risky speculation, ever more harmful to the real economy; it also generated an accelerated concentration of income and wealth. The liberalization was extended to the whole economy. It is in this context that we must place the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the financial reform launched in Mexico, whose early results are analyzed as the beginning of a trajectory that would continue for years up to present time.