Perhaps, in their deliberations over how best to oversee and regulate our economy in the wake of last year’s meltdown, legislators will consider this: despite all the noise made in the financial sector over the last decade about “innovation,” and the financial incentives required to drive it, the overall economy pretty much stagnated. All that innovation now looks as though it yielded little more than better ways for the so-called innovators to reap huge short-term gains at almost everyone else’s expense.
