Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless…
From The New Yorker:
The Epicurean Dealmaker is right: Wall Street bankers create some economic value. But do they create enough of it to justify the rewards they reap? In the first nine months of 2010, the big six banks cleared more than thirty-five billion dollars in profits. “The cataclysmic events took place in the fall of 2008 and the early months of 2009,” Roger Altman, the chairman of Evercore, said to me. “In this industry, that’s a long time ago.”
Despite all the criticism that President Obama has received lately from Wall Street, the Administration has largely left the great money-making machine intact. A couple of years ago, firms such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs faced the danger that the government would break them up, drive them out of some of their most lucrative business lines—such as dealing in derivatives—or force them to maintain so much capital that their profits would be greatly diminished. “None of these things materialized,” Altman noted. “Reforms and changes came in, but they did not have a transformative effect.”
