Innovations?

So many things that are actually no good at all are disguised as 'innovations'. Derivatives were celebrated as innovations, but they're only useful for investors at the highest level, who use gigantic levels of capital and leverage and supercomputer-driven trading platforms. Trading them delivers nothing to the real economy. They just provide the marketmakers with a new way to pump up their books with fictional wealth.

You can say many of the same things about MBS, CDO's, SIV's, and other great 'innovations' of Wall Street. They are not pro-social. They're magic tricks for Wall St. magicians. They do not deliver broadly-distributed benefits for all of society, like a true innovation does.