on money in the abstract

[Mark Kohut]

Josepth Tracy writes: . 
The question is whether the financial sector has created the wealth which its piles of money are supposed to represent.

Paul Krugman, nyt today:
Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.” 
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