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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>The Predictors</i> by Thomas A Bass, to read how a group of chaos scientists made a killing in the futures markets.<p>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.<p>On the second question, I would question your assumption. One of the ways the financial system could shrink in size is through technology.<p>But, going with your assumption, my answer would be "Probably."