The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea

by Bill Emmott

But it’s possible to say all of that, and also recognise that not all financial innovation is valuable, not all trading plays a useful role, and that a bigger financial system is not necessarily a better one. And, indeed, there are good reasons for believing that the financial industry, more than any other sector of the economy, has an ability to generate unnecessary demand for its own services – that more trading and more financial innovation can under some circumstances create harmful volatility against which customers have to hedge, creating more demand for trading liquidity and innovative products; that parts of the financial services industry have a unique ability to attract to themselves unnecessarily high returns and create instability which harms the rest of society.