Geopolitics and Financial Profitability, the Big Pharmaceutical Corporations

ABSTRACT

The pandemic evidenced the struggle for financial profitability of Big Pharmaceutical Corporations, inequality between countries, and within nations, resulting from more than fifty years of stabilization policies, where monetary and fiscal policies have subsumed themselves to the institutional investors’ interests. In the face of lockdown measures and the attempt to return to “normality,” central banks, as lenders of last resort, abandoned financial restriction policies to give way to fiscal policies and promoted a soft readjustment through credit expansion and accelerated public debt looking to recover economic growth in a “fast track.” Proof of this is the worldwide recovery of GDP growth rates but, despite having a rapid recovery, they showed an uncertain scenario in the short and medium terms, accompanied by financial exuberance in stock market indicators at the international level. The focus of this paper will be on demonstrating the profits of pharmaceutical companies, a business that, in the long term, intensified due to the new mutations that SARS-CoV-2 has had during the current situation. It is also important the unequal vaccine access by country and by region. Concluding with a reflection on the struggle between an economy for life and financialized economy. © 2022, Journal of Economic Issues / Association for Evolutionary Economics.