Finance is a cancer ... and is strangling and poisoning everything.

That looks to be way too much emotion and not enough reason.

Given the way the FIRE sector has eaten up the pie of corporate profits in the developed world, with non-FIRE companies often losing money even as FIRE grows, I believe the cancer metaphor is apt. Even "rationalists" are supposed to feel emotions when they match the reality.

If finance is eating the economy, we should get mad at it and call it a cancer. And finance indeed appears to be eating the economy (warning: the paper's author has some political views, but the statistics are sound: finance is capturing increasing portions of economic output, which Should Not Happen unless their ability to minimize risk/predict the future has increased that quickly).