Obama has not stopped there. His address this week included new taxes on the finance industry, ostensibly to hit the 1pc who, according to the fashionable gurus influencing the Obama administration, such as the French economist Thomas Piketty, are creating an unhealthy divide between rich and poor. True, many bankers on Wall Street are paid far too much, and many of the banks did not deserve to be bailed out in the crash of 2008. And yet, it is the flexibility of American finance that has allowed its companies to grow so rapidly. The reason the likes of Amazon or Starbucks or Netflix have been able to roll out their operations around the world at such speed, and with such verve, is that Wall Street has always been willing to throw unlimited sums of money at enterprises it believes in. Amazon, for example, has never made much money, and might not do for a long time, but Wall Street allows it to keep expanding anyway. As the finance industry gets clobbered by higher and higher taxes, that is going to end.