Reply #5: In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips has a lot of scorn

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for insurance companies and for finance in general, which he think contribute little to the economy and, in fact, result in a less competitive economy because they profit off of finance tricks and legislated markets, rather than by producing something valuable to society.

One example of how this works (but which is just a small part of this thing) is that, when the US goes into debt, the US has to issue bonds, which creates a lot of profit for the bond markets. So, debt is bad for most of America, but it's really good and really profitable for a small sector of wealthy and powerful people on Wall St.