In Defense of Finance
Bunch of hogwash.<p>- &quot;Bankers and financeers deserve their pay because they take all the risk&quot;, the mind cringes at this one. Risk, what risk?? When was the last time any banker or financieer personally risked anything in their activity?? They get it right, they get paid millions. They get it wrong... they also get paid millions! After 2008 nobody went to jail, no person responsible responsible got homeless, or lost their yacht, never mind their house, or lost their life savings, etc.<p>Simply put: any person with no savings that takes a low-paid unprotected job is risking <i>infinitely more</i> than any Wall Street-type. If they are in a position that if the company fails they lose their home, their kids go hungry, they can&#x27;t afford healthcare, etc, then they are risking infinitely more than anyone who &quot;invests&quot; in that company.<p>- Besides that, capital paid an average of ~5% risk free, staying remarkably constant in the past 2 century. This is empirical data that contradict the fact that rich investors get paid for their acumen.<p>- Also, even if they did take on &quot;risk&quot;, do they deserve to get paid 300x, 400x, 1000x more than the people actually <i>making</i> the things? It&#x27;s ridiculous and indefensible.<p>- Banks are fundamentally a scam. They &quot;loan&quot; out money that THEY DO NOT OWN! When issuing a loan, they credit themselves with assets, create a liability at the central bank, then when they get paid back they pocket the interest. Then why can&#x27;t I, a person looking to buy a home, or to start a business, skip the middle-man then and create a liability myself with the central bank? Ah, no, because it can&#x27;t be a free for all and there has to be someone regulating that and deciding who gets credit and how much. Okay! Then why is it a handful of rich people? Why is that decision not made democractically! Hell, even an &quot;algorithm&quot; (in the sense of a set of well-defined procedures that return ACCEPT or REJECT in a completely transparent way for any request for credit) would be better than what we have now.<p>Essentially, we&#x27;ve privatised risk assessment and fucking <i>credit</i>, the most fundamental concept without which no economy can ever work! We are all slaves to the decisions of the people with the capital, there is no accountability, and if things go south it&#x27;s all our money that goes into fixing things. Reminder that ~200 people control over 40t USD (that&#x27;s $40,000,000,000,000) in assets. If that&#x27;s not neofeudalism I don&#x27;t know what is.<p>- &quot;But we can look at MBS as a solution to a coordination problem. There are 10,000 families who want to move into a house today and pay for it over a couple of decades. There are 10,000 construction workers who want to build a house today and get paid for it today.&quot; So finance institutions get paid billions for those 10,000 mortgages because they are &quot;coordinating&quot; 10,000 contractors. Right, are we supposed to be all stupid?<p>Also, this is indeed a problem, but exacerbated precisely <i>because</i> capital and credit is privatised and not democratically or algorithmically controlled. So we have to beg Our Lords to dispense some money and let it flow in our economy (for an exorbitant fee, of course).<p>- &quot;The groupthink that gripped everyone else, from mortgage lenders to bank traders to rating agencies [about mortgage-backed securities], was too pervasive to be overcome by institutional incentives.&quot; Again, completely misrepresenting the causes of the problem. Perverse institutional incentives are precisely what caused this! They were making absolute bank peddling this crap assets. Why should they stop? I wouldn&#x27;t. They had no incentive to do so. They knew that when the bubble burst it would not be their problem. People getting their homes foreclosed would suffer, yes, but not them. They would be far too rich to suffer any meaningful consequence (even if they took some personal financial loss). With some luck, since they had the political and regulatory system completely captured, they could avoid suffering <i>any</i> consequences at all, big or small (which is what ended up happening).<p>Rating agencies again had all incentives to mark trash as AAA. What&#x27;s the penalty if they failed again?<p>EDIT: I welcome constructive dialog if you think I&#x27;m misrepresenting things.