<i>"Finance companies get government bailouts and are more likely to succeed."</i><p>You are painting things with a very broad brush. How many hedge funds are there? Thousands. How many of them got bailout funding? Virtually none. How many top tier investment banks are there that got bailed out by the government? 5 or 6? I rest my case...<p>Besides, Finance is a very vast field. Hence, the words <i>Finance companies</i> means nothing. A hedge fund is, essentially, a startup... and the likelihood of failure is high. By contrast, a bank is anything but a startup. A boutique investment bank and a boutique HFT hedge fund are both "finance companies", but their cultures are more distant from one another than what you can imagine.<p>You are thinking of GS, MS, City, ML and the like, and generalizing that all finance companies are like that... which is utterly absurd.