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404 • International Tradefinancial assets is still possible for a time, but when continued investmentof borrowed money drives up the value of financial assets more rapidlythan the increase in real goods and services, collapse is inevitable, even ifwe cannot predict precisely when it will occur.■ Finance and DistributionEcological economists also focus on the distributional impacts of financialmarkets. As anyone who reads newspapers knows, salaries in the financialsector for decades have been much higher than in the rest of the economyas a whole and are often unrelated to performance. But this is barely thetip of the inequity iceberg.Most financial assets are owned by the already wealthy and grow fasterthan the economy as a whole over the long run, thus leading to greaterconcentration of wealth. Furthermore, many financial assets and speculativetrades contribute nothing to the growth of real goods and services.For example, many hedge funds use computers that detect minor discrepanciesin international exchange rates. They are programmed to buyand sell huge amounts of international currency very rapidly, creating realprofits while doing nothing to increase real wealth. This is nothing morethan a redistribution of existing wealth.Furthermore, the financial sector does not use a level playing field.Hedge funds are open only to very wealthy investors. The name hedge implieslow-risk investment, which implies (as we now know, erroneously)high guaranteed returns to the already wealthy. Large investment banksinvest in computers and programs that allow them to act on information1/30th of a second faster than other investors. Essentially knowing in advancewhat the market will do, they can make enormous profits with littlerisk. 21 Average investors compete at a disadvantage, and those withtoo few resources to invest are not even allowed in the game.To make matters worse, we have already seen that firms too big to failin the financial sector can capture the gains from risky gambles while societypays the costs, time and again.Even when financial assets do contribute to the real growth of marketgoods and services, for the richest nations, which host the largest financialsectors, marginal costs of economic growth often outweigh the marginalbenefits. In this case, the few reap the financial benefits, while themany, even those living in those richest nations, pay the social and environmentalcosts.21 C. Duhigg, Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds, New York Times, July 23, 2009.