The size of finance

Graph #1: A Gross Value Added comparison:
GVA FCB as a percent of GVA NCB

Financial Corporate Business (FCB) starts the graph at about 4% the size of Nonfinancial Corporate Business (NCB), and ends up at, oh, call it 16%.

There was a fourfold increase in the size of finance, relative to the productive (nonfinancial) corporate sector. That fourfold increase occupied the whole second half of the 20th century. The effect on the economy was nothing like the fourfold increase in the price of oil in three or four months of 1973. 

Nothing like it. In the 1970s, for a while people almost stopped blaming wages for inflation, blaming oil instead. But in the whole second half of the twentieth century, far as I know, no one ever blamed the cost of finance for causing inflation. Finance was the magic bullet, all good, with zero harmful effects.

Zero harmful effects? Nah, I don't buy that.