European Tribune - Countdown to $200 oil meets Anglo Disease

in today's economy, the cannibalistic sector is not oil&gas, but finance. Bankers, through debt, have the ability to convert future cash-flows into immediate profits. Such immediate returns attract more capital, talent and resources (which cannot go to other sectors) and impose an iron discipline on the rest of the economy: those that provide the debt want to ensure that the future cash-flows will indeed materialize, and move in to ensure a relentless focus, in the underlying activities, on profitability at the expense of all other criteria. The immediate contribution of the financial world to measured GDP and growth makes it a popular industry, thus reinforcing its influence - and spreading out its way of thinking, focused on monetary gains and financial "efficiency." So not only the rest of the economy gets squeezed for any extra drop of profitability, but the language of financial analysts becomes the dominant one of not only economic discourse but also political discourse;

Just as the Dutch disease was predicated on a "natural resource" in the ground, so the Anglo disease is predicated on an "unnatural resource" of historically super cheap money. Debt has always been a mechanism for turning future cash flows into current money, but historically since WW2 equity has been more important. Cheap money changed that equation and allowed things like the "private equity industry" to take off:

"Real Equity" is pretty well regulated, both from a taxation and a corporate governance point of view. Debt, in the form of "Private Equity" is most definitely not well regulated in either sphere and this enabled a lot of the massive wealth transfers...