> I'm asking you as an economist: If this were true (Michael's "reverse finance capital"), what sort of pattern would we expect to find in the data?
Do you mean an out-of-trend switching of jobs into the "financial industry" (and in other industries' "financial" functions) from other private-business employment? I don't see how one could get around the issue of distinguishing productive from unproductive labor? That doesn't mean that the simpler data crunching wouldn't be informative.
Here's something I found interesting on that regard:
http://homepage.newschool.edu/~foleyd/FoleyINETBrettonWoodsRev20110605.pdf