and the concept of time was changed. In a virtual space of continuous circulation of bits and bytes, the global economies experienced a prosperous period, in which the abundance of liquidity enabled massive investments to be made since capital was flowing through the globe at an impressive pace. Circulating capital enabled several operations, from the financing of mergers and acquisitions of major corporate groups to public/private partnerships that enabled investments in different infrastructure projects, construction of ports, railways and power generation and transmission facilities. Large business groups become international, increasingly expanding to beyond their borders, and there was enough capital to fund their growing strategies, represented by investments in public and private debt titles and securities issued by companies and government. At the same time, financial institutions and investors from all over the world were seeking to increase the amount of capital in circulation through investments that often were unrelated to the projects in progress in the real economy. Therefore, the financial indexes traded in the stock market and in the counter gained a crucial importance by feeding the financial entanglement, whether working as a protection against the variation of the prices of assets in circulation or making capital more profitable through investment positions that speculated on the variation of assets prices in the short-term and boosted the profits of portfolios ran by assets managers, totaling trillions of dollars. The need to pay for this capital in circulation pushed investors into several markets and the impact could be seen on the strong demand of the operations related to the issuance of debt or shares. New issuance multiplied at impressive proportions and the demand of investors was surprisingly high. When mining company Vale went to market to refinance the US$ 18 billion loan through the issuance of debentures, euro bonuses and bilateral credit transactions or syndicated operations with several financial institutions, the strong demand for these bonds enabled the company to refinance the total debt owed to the banks way before the deadline set to take out the bridge loan used to the acquisition of the Canadian nickel mining company. IPOs happened on several stock markets around the globe and every project, at that time, seemed to be feasible, since there was a significant amount of capital in circulation willing to take increasingly higher risks to ensure its yield. It all would have been perfect if not for the imbalance between the amount of financial assets in circulation and the wealth generated by world economies. That imbalance showed that the degree of debt leverage had crossed a safe limit. After all, we were living in the era of capital deregulation, in which the market was considered an entity capable of correcting the distortions created in the process of global exchanges. However, what happened in practice was a gradual decoupling of Wall Street transactions from Main Streets, especially in the United States and Europe. In recent years, we had turned to Wall Street as a whole for advice on how to run the complex system that is our economy. Now, who is there to