Abstract

Amidst the global financial crisis, Adair Turner sparked a media and political storm in the United Kingdom when he described aspects of financial innovation as ‘socially useless’. As he put it:

It is hard to distinguish between valuable financial innovation and non-valuable. Clearly, not all innovation should be treated in the same category as the innovation of either a new pharmaceutical drug or a new retail format. I think that some of it is socially useless activity.