The finance industry serves an important function but the key word for many is the word serves. It has been estimated that the ideal size of this industry should be around 2.5% in relation to other industries that make up a country's GDP. In most western countries the financial sectors have grown to almost 10%. This results in a 'brain drain' from other sectors meaning that the best and brightest university students graduate to become money speculators rather than engineers and doctors. Of course, the finance industry provides essential services for the other sectors of the real economy, for example, lending facilities, and accounting services, but the bigger this sector grows the more it tends to feed upon itself with money circulating within the sector and never entering onto the real economy. This is a world where currency is produced rather than real wealth and speculation on manipulated markets replaces real productivity.
A good example is how corporations use their profits to buy their own shares to give the impression that the business is healthy rather than investing in research or infrastructure to make sure the company is actually healthy. Since the global financial crash or 'Credit Crunch' in 2007/2008, Central banks have cut interest rates to almost zero for banks and large corporate institutions and have been engaged in Quantitative Easing (QE). QE is very basically national governments buying bad debts from the biggest banks in order to give them enough money not to go bankrupt. However, it has resulted in huge quantities of money from the real economy being transferred into the financial sector. This has led to record profits and salaries for bankers and record highs being recorded on almost every market including stock exchanges and bond markets. But the downside of this is that the prices of real goods that ordinary people must buy have gone up whilst most people's salaries have gone down. So, within the financial sector there has been an inflationary spiral, whilst in the real economy people are experiencing deflation. Inflation occurs for two reasons. The first is when the money supply increases which means the money you already own is worth less because it has devalued. The second is when the velocity of money increases which means money is flowing around the system more quickly.
Since 2008 the money supply within the financial sector has increased dramatically along with the velocity due to QE. This has resulted in numerous bubbles being produced with the prices of shares, bonds, commodities and other markets like derivatives and real estate increasing dramatically to heights never seen before. Conversely, in the real economy profits and wages are in decline because very little of this extra money is leaving the financial sector and the velocity has slowed because people and businesses are very concerned about spending money that they don't have. This is a symptom of financial sectors growing to large in proportion to other parts of the economy. Another side effect is that too much trading on the commodities markets results in price increases for everyday goods for people living in the real economy regardless of supply and demand (Price Discovery). Prices now depend on the whims of traders, high frequency trading by computers and the fraudulent practices of those with inside knowledge manipulating the markets.
In many advanced economies outside of the world of high finance deflation is a major concern. One of the main reasons is that since 2008 the velocity of money has sharply declined. Large international businesses and corporations have been investing huge amounts of their profits into buying their own shares on the stock markets. This means even more more money being sucked into the financial sector from other sectors. These businesses are also building massive reserves of money in offshore tax havens rather than investing in innovation and research or their workforce. So there is also a knock on effect of less quality jobs and lower wages. Lower incomes and less jobs means that people don't have so much money to spend which means less demands for goods and services which means less profits for businesses owners and in essence the beginnings of a deflationary spiral. Why is almost every nation on earth in debt? It might be surprising or even shocking to some people to learn that government treasury departments don't actually have any money. To get some they have to create government bonds which are then bought by banks and financial institutions who essentially create the money to buy them. This means that the government doesn't actually create the money supply as most people would assume. Instead they borrow the money into existence and pass on the debt to the public to be paid with buy their taxes. In reality the taxes pay for little more than the interest payments and governments would appear to have no real chance of ever paying back the money that they owe. It would probably be a very bad idea to pay back these debts anyway as once the debt is repaid the money would disappear from circulation. This would lead to a very real lack of currency in the system and certainly not enough to go round for everybody.
At this point you might well be shaking your head in disbelief and be wondering why governments don't just create money themselves debt free? Well, that is a very good question!
A country's deficit is sometimes confused with it's debt but there are some important differences between these two terms. The deficit is the amount of money a government must borrow each year in order to pay it's bills. This figure is added to the debt which is the total amount of money a government owes. For any government to start paying off it's debt it must stop borrowing and produce a surplus rather than a deficit. All of the developed economies of the world are based upon consumption. People have to buy products or use services continually or the system will collapse. There is one critical flaw in this system and that is we all live on a planet that has finite resources. That the world does not contain enough materials to support endless growth would seem obvious to most of us. But, the current system has been designed with the assumption that economies can continue to grow for ever. All nations economies and indeed the world economy must grow by at least a few percent each year to remain in a healthy state. A few percent seems quite reasonable at first glance but to a mathematician who understands how exponential growth works this amount of growth results in huge increases in the numbers even after a relatively modest amount of time. After WWII many countries had been ravaged by the fighting and much of their infrastructures destroyed. Britain was bankrupted by the conflict and had to negotiate for it's colonies to be come independent as it didn't have any money to continue it's empire. The world needed rebuilding and was payed for with American dollars. America had actually profited and grown economically during the war and was now in a position to dominate financially with the dollar becoming the reserve currency of the world. This meant the dollar was where other nations chose to invest their wealth. The dollar was the safest investment to make. What's more international trading in oil and gold could only be conducted using U.S. dollars. Basically, countries needed (and still do) dollars to pay their bills. In 1971 President Nixon took the dollar off of the 'Gold Standard' so that the U.S. could increase the supply and by default the dollar became linked to the most valuable and sought after commodity - Oil.
Since 2008 and the American government's QE program there has been tensions between different economies. This is because when America introduces more dollars into the system it means the dollars other countries already have are worth less. The current global system of organizing economies is responsible for causing massive and growing inequalities. This is very important. At this time the 85 richest people in the world own more wealth than half of the planet's population - that's over 3.5 billion people. It would appear that this is not sustainable.
Within the current system there is a threshold, an amount of wealth that is so large that like large bodies in space has a 'gravitational pull' which attracts ever more money towards it. For those people that have an amount of money below this threshold it is increasingly difficult to save even modest amounts of wealth. As the concentration of wealth is being attracted to fewer and fewer people at the very top, there is less and less to be shared amongst those at the bottom.