THE ECONOMIST
What's wrong with finance
In this year’s presidential address to the American Financial Association, Luigi Zingales asked “Does Finance Benefit Society?”. He concluded that “at the current state of knowledge there is no theoretical reason to support the notion that all the growth of the financial sector in the last 40 years has been beneficial to society”. And a recent paper from the Bank of International Settlements, the central bankers’ central bank, concluded that “the level of financial development is good only up to a point, after which it becomes a drag on growth”.
Note that these objections are not the same as the argument, familiar from the crisis, that individual banks are too big to fail (or TBTF). This approach is more akin to the idea of the “resource curse” that economies with an excessive exposure to a commodity, such as oil, may become imbalanced. Just as the easy money from drilling for oil may make an economy slow to develop alternative business sectors, the easy money from trading in assets, and lending against property, may distort a developed economy.
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