Concluding assessment of the decoupling hypothesis

The stated goal of the present study is to document and classify the debate about the potential decoupling of the financial sector from the real economy, and then to introduce it into the context of established scientific lines of research. In our concluding analysis, we do not want so much to summarize our findings in some “balanced” fashion – which was largely achieved in Section 5.1 – but rather to focus on addressing potential tenable indications of decoupling. Identifying such indications that can be taken seriously demands a certain theoretical grounding, and then above all empirical verification. Ultimately, it is not the theoretical possibility of decoupling which is of interest, but rather the question of whether and to what extent this involves a phenomenon that actually exists.