This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 8th,

24. I'm Caleb Brown. People have long been suspicious of

financial markets. What they do is largely opaque to

average people and the activities of those markets seems in many ways completely

disconnected from the real economy. That pervasive myth is one of the reasons Cato's

Norbert Schell and Jennifer Scholf wrote their new book Financing

Opportunity, which is available now. We spoke last week. You guys are probably too young to remember this, but there was a little thing called Occupy Wall

Street.

And for people of my age and maybe a little bit older

who remember Occupy Wall Street,

a whole lot of the complaints about were about financial markets and the

disconnectedness of financial markets to real life and so when so when we think about what financial markets do for individuals,

for businesses, what's the, give us that connection, connect those things.

Sure, that is one of the reasons that we wrote the book, because what you find is

historically that was not unique, that critique was not unique to the Occupy Wall Street guys.

That sort of thing has been going on for a really long time, like basically since the 1700s that thing being the

criticism that financial markets are just useless gambling speculative activity that doesn't do anything for the real economy.

So that predates Occupy Wall Street and it certainly is still going on and it seems to be ramping up again and that's one of the reasons that we

wrote the book to say hey look this isn't really a new criticism and when you really

look at it it doesn't hold up the empirical evidence doesn't really hold up that all of that activity is

useless and the truth is the financial markets and real economic activity go hand in hand. One of the reasons that the

United States has had such enormous prosperity in the real quote-unquote

...