[akiselev]

> Why are the big intangible transfers in Finance and Insurance, or Health Care, or even sometimes Real Estate all of a sudden a problem now?

Because those transfers are becoming less and less attached to tangible transactions of value while increasingly allowing the middlemen to embed themselves into the economy through regulatory capture. That's not to say they weren't a slowly growing problem before, but there was enough productivity to be gained through low hanging fruit to justify many middlemen who could claim to efficiently allocate it while taking a cut. Lawyers who can navigate complex regulatory schemes, investors who can free up capital by stripping companies in a dying industry for capital to invest in a growing one, bankers who let companies hedge their bets and trade their extreme highs for less risk of a catastrophic low, insurance companies to do the hard work of data collection so that risk/reward can be accurately priced, and so on.

There is a lot of room for all of these industries to act as middlemen while providing value, but just like a bunch of farmers can grow so much of one vegetable that they all collapse economically (taking the food supply with them), so can these middlemen go too far and bring the entire system down with them.

Take health care for example: we spend more of our GDP on healthcare than the vast majority of developed nations with worse outcomes despite the fact that the majority of research and development for drugs/devices/therapeutics is financed and carried out in the US. How much of that money is going to health insurance middlemen who structure the system to obfuscate pricing from consumers through layers of bureaucracy? How much of that money went (and continues to go) to corrupting the nation's politicians to prevent proper reform of our healthcare system? How much longer can we go with out of control healthcare costs before there is a reckoning like Medicare for all that wipes out the medical insurance industry - essentially putting everyone in the terrible spot of trading the livelihood of millions for the livelihood of millions?

That has always been a problem and it's only getting bigger.