You're asking a couple different things here and it's not clear how or if they relate to the article posted. The second question is does finance help business

You're asking a couple different things here and it's not clear how or if they relate to the article posted. The second question is does finance help business or society. As answered, yes, it definitely does. Your response to that answer was to say the person was dodging your question, but they didn't. They just only answered one, not both. Your first question was is all this financial innovation merely amounting to highly developed parasitism? This question isn't near as clear. What is "all this financial innovation" you're referring to? To be fair, the article itself isn't super clear on all the factors that make the author think the US is so far outpacing Europe. But there are three things specifically named. First, offering low-fee passive investments like ETFs. Second, less banking system fragmentation because all of the United States speaks a common language and uses a single regulatory system, and obviously the one country in the union controls its own currency. Third, it mentions greater public sector investment. The US government has injected a lot more money into its economy and financial industries than Europeans governments have. I would not think any of those things qualify as parasitism, so presumably you're referring to unrelated things to bring up a personal hobby horse that has nothing to do with this specific article or discussion. I'm guessing you mean broader financialization of all industry (i.e. automakers are more banks than automakers) and the development of increasingly sophisticated high-risk, high-yield derivatives and securitization of things that used to not be tradeable that has happened since the 1980s. If that's what you mean, it's reasonable to ask if those things are positive, but why here? Does every discussion need to turn into the same discussion?