Summary & Study Guide--The Finance Curse

How global finance is making us all poorer.

The must-read summary of "The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer," by Nicholas Shaxson.

As a country's financial sector develops, it improves the nation's economic well-being and quality of life—but only up to a point. After that point, it reduces economic growth and inflicts much damage. We call this the finance curse. The United States, Britain, and many other Western economies passed this optimal point long ago. The 2008 Great Recession was part of the damage.

As an economy becomes financialized, there is a massive growth in the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors, but not in the manufacturing and industrial sectors. Rather than creating wealth, the goal of finance becomes extracting value from the underlying economy. This way of thinking also becomes internalized into the economy, society, and culture, generating economic discrimination that underpins all discriminations—racial, gender, sexual, and geographical.

This book documents the story of how finance got a stranglehold on society and reveals how we might release ourselves from its grasp.

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