The sustainability of a creative-finance-led economy.

Six great trends have characterized the evolution of mature capitalist economies in the recent decades: 1. successful efforts to lower inflation from the levels of the 1970s; 2. Real growth significantly lower as compared to early post-WW2 decades; 3. a greater frequency in financial instability episodes; 4. the so-called “financialization” of the economic system; 5. rising inequalities in income and wealth distribution; 6. the escalation of “creative” finance. Specialist contributions have offered empirical evidences and analytical arguments on each of these topics, yet a comprehensive approach is still in a preliminary phase. Without excessive ambitions, our contribution pursues this direction. After a selection of stylized facts for the great trends (Section 1), we consider the principle of shareholder value as the fundamental ideological bias at work behind them (Section 2). In our proposed interpretation (Section 3), the reversal of the intermediation structure, associated with creative finance, may have a pivotal role in the construction of a comprehensive approach, as the diverse channels of its possible adverse effects on the real economy may subsequently account for the other stylized facts. We then point at two “limits” to the expansion of creative finance (Section 4): a “Kaleckian limit” and a “Minskian limit”. Section 5 resumes, with some hints at central banking