Flash Finance and economic policy

Abstract

In the most recent decades, the economy has changed its relationship over time. Transactions tend to go faster and short-term behaviors have spread across the board. There is evidence that this phenomenon explains some aspects of the post-2008 crisis. In particular, the financial markets follow an extraordinary dynamic of acceleration that leads to a good part of the operations taking place in microseconds (something evident in what it has to do with high frequency trading systems).
All this creates very important challenges for democratic politics as a whole, and above all, for the process of economic policiymaking. The crucial problem is that, although the latter have also tended to accelerate, they are systematically lagging behind the capital markets (that is, there is a dynamic of open desynchronization between politics and finance), which hinders their possibilities of achieving their goals. objectives effectively. All this forces us to rethink the role of lags, now turned into an element of the first order to advance in the definition of optimal policy. This article focuses on how the time pressure factor has exerted a notable impulse to some important institutional changes in the political-economic processes.