Adam Smith described money as the “great wheel of circulation”. By facilitating economic expansion, the financial system plays its part in raising living standards. For these functions the banks have always taken their cut. However, this has increased dramatically in recent decades. US financial companies earned 10-15 per cent of total US corporate profits in the 1950s and 1960s, but now account for 30-40 per cent of the total. If profits from the financial activities of industrial and commercial companies are included, finance in this broader sense could soon account for a majority of US corporate profits.

This trend for finance to grow much faster than the “real” economy is also apparent in the UK and elsewhere. In return for absorbing a rising share of society’s resources, especially highly qualified workers, what is being delivered in return?