The Finance Curse – Professor Gerald Epstein

Dr. Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among his many excellent works he and Juan Antonio Montecino calculated the costs to the United States economy of its financial sector across three categories: rents and excess profits; misallocation; and the crisis costs of 2008. Gerald believes that the number he arrives at, an excess cost of $22.3 trillion between 1990 and 2023, is likely to be a modest underestimation because the costs of the financial crisis may be much greater and the numbers do not involve lost tax revenues from various financial innovations.