One of the most fascinating things for me in Steve Feilmeier’s presentation at yesterday’s annual economic outlook conference were a couple slides that showed how carried away America has gotten with financial manipulation.
Last year, roughly 21 percent of our GDP came from the earnings of the financial sector. And another slide showed that the world’s financial assets — stocks, savings, bonds, derivatives, etc. — went from about 120 percent of the world’s actual production in 1990 to 356 percent last year. That tells me there was too much manipulation of the world’s money.