A reliance on a big financial sector brings vast rewards for some, but low paid, low skilled, causal work for others, leading to a reliance on credit to support living standards, further diminishing disposable income, restricted access to home ownership. and fluctuations in demand. Communities and living spaces can effectively become segregated and gated.

Furthermore, wealth extraction (as opposed to wealth creation) is a central feature of the finance curse. People at the top extract wealth from people at the bottom. This increases inequality.

And the way we measure our economies tends to hide these effects. Consider it like this. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, walks into a bar. Suddenly every punter is, on average, a billionaire. But to understand how well the drinkers are really doing, we need to remove his billions from the equation. The enormous wealth accruing to a relatively small number of people in the City of London or Wall Street are not helping the broader populations of these countries.