The search for gain – which drives shareholder returns, speculative trading, and interest-bearing loans – lodges dependency upon continual GDP growth deep within the financial system. For John Fullerton, the banker who walked away from Wall Street, here lies the source of the problem. ‘We’ve reached the logical conclusion of this expansionist economic paradigm,’ he says. ‘Unless we can achieve magical decoupling we have an exponential function on a closed system planet … yet the finance system has no in-built plateau, it can’t “mature” – and none of the experts in finance are even thinking
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