Financial Innovation: The Bright and Dark Sides

Professor Thorston Beck gives the keynote address at the 2013 Long Finance Spring Conference looking at “the Bright and the Dark sides” of financial innovation. This involves setting out what exactly financial innovation is and looking at its effects; providing growth opportunities and in GDP per capita but also leading to fragility in banks and volatility in certain industries. Professor Beck goes on to look at the interaction between the financial sector and growth, and at two different views of what the financial sector should be: financial intermediation (a meta-sector supporting the rest of the economy) vs. financial sector (simply one sector of many).