I was CTO of a dot-com in 2000 when the Bubble first. We had to close the company down and I ended up taking a contract setting up web servers and application s

I was CTO of a dot-com in 2000 when the Bubble first. We had to close the company down and I ended up taking a contract setting up web servers and application servers and doing the security for online trading systems at Deutsche Bank. I discovered that investment banks are very quick to embrace new technologies that give them a competitive edge over their competitors. At the time, that included techology and software that was coming out of the Internet sector - I personally deployed Red Hat Linux, Apache/Stronghold, Netscape web server, Tomcat, Weblogic and nCipher during the 2000-'02 timeframe. So, there's no doubt in my mind that a significant chunk of revenues found its way from the investment banks to companies like Red Hat and Netscape. Whether that was a "make or break" contribution is another question. They may have contributed to the success of a company like Red Hat but I think it would be a stretch to say that Red Hat would not have been successful without orders from the financial sector. As well as financial innovation (i.e. creating CDS, CDOs, etc.), the investment banks and hedge funds also do technology innovation. They were crunching "Big Data" more than a decade before it became a buzzword, and using clusters and grid computing, graphics cards and FPGAs long before Bitcoin arrived on the scene. Go read The Predictors by Thomas A Bass, to read how a group of chaos scientists made a killing in the futures markets. Some of those technologies end upo making their way into wider use but, while their contribution to the world's tech stack is significant, I think it's dwarfed by the new technologies that are created by non-financial-focused companies, like Apple and Tesla. On the second question, I would question your assumption. One of the ways the financial system could shrink in size is through technology. But, going with your assumption, my answer would be "Probably."