Too Much Finance!

From the early 1990s, notably from the empirical investigations of King and Levine (1993), there developed a strong consensus that financial development facilitates economic growth.By the early 2010s, however, the empirical evidence for this proposition was beginning to look weaker and weaker (Rioja and Valev 2004;Rousseau and Wachtel 2011).The basis for a new consensus, commonly referred to as 'Too Much Finance?' was then developed by the work of Arcand et al. (2012Arcand et al. ( , 2015) ) and Cecchetti and Kharroubi (2012): the crucial finding is that financial development appears to promote growth up to some threshold level of development, but beyond that level financial development becomes a drag on economic growth.This special issue brings together papers from an online workshop in July 2025 and a conference in January 2026, co-organised with partners including the Balanced Economy Project, Finance Innovation Lab, International Inequality Institute, Manchester School and Tax Justice Network, and hosted by the London School of Economics.The aim of the project was to update and assess work on 'Too much finance?' (TMF), and to place that research in a wider context.As our title indicates, the assembled papers confirm the central TMF result sufficiently that the question mark-sensibly applied in the title of the original papers by Arcand, Berkes and Panizza-can be considered obsolete.