What exactly is financialization? How does it relate to what’s happening in the rest of the economy? Does it hinder growth, and if so, how? At the end of the nineteenth century, many on both the left and right regarded finance as a vampire sucking the lifeblood out of “real” businesses, workers, and, in Britain’s settler colonies, local econo­mies. Indeed, Stanford literature professor Franco Moretti has argued that the classic 1897 Bram Stoker novel Dracula…