Good Finance Gone Bad

Baseline Scenario

As the Lehman anniversary approaches, defenders of the financial sector struggle into position – partly in response to your comments (also here). They offer three main points:

1. We need finance to make the economy work.
2. Financial innovation delivers value, although it’s not perfect (but what is?)
3. Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Point #1 is correct, but this does not necessarily mean we need finance as currently organized. The financial sector worked fine in the past, with regard to supporting innovation and sustaining growth. Show me the evidence that changes in our financial structure over the past 30 years have helped anyone outside the financial sector.

On #2: Financial innovation has obviously benefited the people who run and operate large financial companies. Has it helped anyone else, including their own sharedholders? And if you can show broader social benefits (e.g., lower cost of capital, better ability to take nonfinancial risks that make sense, or anything else), do these outweigh the massive social/fiscal costs that are now apparent?

Which leads to point #3: what kind of egg did the finance goose lay? Obviously we now need to go back and recalculate economic growth – if much of what was done by finance was issue loans that were not likely to be repaid (while not recognizing the probable losses).

But the unfortunate side effects of finance lie much more in the future than in the past. It’s not lowering recent growth by some fraction of a percentage point that should bother us, it’s the likely behavior of large-scale finance, now more powerful and with greater concentration of power.

Read more . . .

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Tags: baseline scenario, economic growth, economy work, financial innovation, financial sector, financial structure, fiscal costs, Innovation, lehman, loans, losses

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Consider This, Democracy, Finance, Innovation Needed, Need to Know, baseline scenario, economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.