Big Pharma, financialization and the geopolitics of inequality

Abstract

Understanding financialization through big pharmaceutical companies evidenced the struggle for the financial profitability of shareholders and stakeholders in the development of what Hilferding initially defined as financial capital and later Minsky updated as money manager capitalism. This is how during the pandemic the accelerated growth of the profitability of large pharmaceutical companies or Big Pharma became evident, the inequality between countries and the inequity within nations as a result of more than fifty years of stabilization policies where monetary and fiscal policy have been subsumed to the interests of institutional investors. Faced with the confinement measures and the attempt to return to "normality", central banks, as lenders of last resort, abandoned financial restriction policies to give play to fiscal policy and promote a smooth readjustment through credit expansion and accelerated public indebtedness in order to recover economic growth in a fast track. Proof of this is the worldwide recovery of GDP growth rates, which despite having recovered rapidly, show a scenario of uncertainty in the short and medium term, accompanied by financial exuberance in stock market indicators at the international level. In this paper we are interested in showing the profits of Big Pharma (pharmaceutical companies), a business that in the long term will intensify in the face of the new mutations that SARS-COV-2 has demonstrated in the course of the current situation; secondly, it is important to demonstrate the inequity of access to vaccines by country and by region; finally, a reflection on the struggle between an economy for life and an economy that responds to the process of financialization.