Historian Niall Ferguson has suggested that much of what went wrong with the global financial system in recent years stemmed from the triumph of tranactions over relationships, the triumph of "Planet Finance", with its derivatives valued at around USD700 trillion, over "Planet Earth" with its annual global GDP of only USD50 trillion.
Is this just the largest scale example yet of the growing global imbalance between value and values - i.e. between how much people are worth outwardly, in terms of financial value, and what they're really worth inwardly?