Dr. Stephen Kinsella:

Over the past 30 years there has been a process called financialisation. It has many definitions, but basically it means finance becomes more and more important to the arteries of the economy whereas before it was not that important. Credit as a share of GDP explodes, wages as a share of GDP go down and profits go up. I have finished a very large study comparing Iceland and Ireland in terms of financialisation. The larger financial structures get, they become a death sentence for small open economies because the chances of a crisis happening are just so large that making them a bigger proportion of the economy relative to other things such as construction is a real problem.

Rebalancing these things is very interesting. A hedge fund manager called Toby Nangle wrote a brilliant article on VOX in which he completely destroyed the secular stagnation argument, which is that falling worker productivity due to ageing and excessive indebtedness means we will have low growth and low inflation forever. He stated the reason is labour's bargaining power has fallen, therefore wages have fallen, and because wages have fallen we will not see large increases in aggregate demand, consumption and investment. It is a really intriguing argument, effectively a Marxist argument, made by a hard-core asset manager. Is it more important to rebalance these things? I absolutely believe so. I am an advocate of large-scale taxes on profits. If one is able to-----