[wpietri]

Those are two different questions.

I don't think we can reasonably expect everybody to really know everything. Wall Street in particular is a highly complex world, where only some of that complexity is really necessary. I've been reading the financial press since before I was in high school and spent years working in the industry. I don't feel like I fully understand it, and I'm sure I never will.

That said, I think the reputation is reasonably justified. Many smart people have pointed out that the financial sector has increased drastically in size, soaking up an awful lot of money relative to the value it creates in the economy. I'm sure people do dislike their banks, but at least those banks do something for them. Goldman Sachs extracts billions from the economy and doesn't do jack for average people. If those average people hear from people closer to the problem that Goldman Sachs is a vampire squid, I don't think it's unreasonable of them to trust that and tie it to their very reasonable economic resentments.

[mruts]

Neither does Oracle, MemSQL, Mongo, MSSQL, C#, Java, or anything we technical folk talk about. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t create value for the world.

[wpietri]

It doesn't mean it doesn't, but it doesn't mean it does.

Oracle in particular is an interesting example here. Their revenues are $40 billion per year. I know for a fact that some of that revenue is from companies that are stuck using Oracle for historical reasons; they wouldn't use it if they were starting fresh today with, say, Postegres. Oracle surely knows this, and so has an extractive, rentier approach to pricing.

Are they a company that creates $40 billion in value every year? I doubt it. Is it possible that net of costs, they are a net negative? Definitely.

This is even more true with financial companies, who act as intermediaries or are external actors to transactions. I used to work for a proprietary trading firm. We had no customers. Our job was to go into the markets and turn a pile of money into a bigger pile of money. As market-makers, we provided a little more liquidity to the markets. But did we create societal value in line with how much money we extracted? I sure don't think so. Which is part of why after a few years I got out and never went back.

[HenryKissinger]

Why does it matter if Goldman Sachs doesn't do jack for average people? Neither does SpaceX, or Virgin Galactic, or Tesla Motors. Companies specialize in whatever field they want, and some make the conscious decision to cater to a certain clientele.

[wpietri]

We're talking about public perception of a company, so whether people find them personally useful is definitely one factor in that.

Another factor surely is notional utility. Even if somebody buys a different car, they can understand what Tesla might do for them. They might never fly on Virgin Galactic, but they could imagine doing it. What Goldman does is something most people will not only never need, but would have a very hard time imagining that they need.

[dcow]

But they do. They provide services people pay for.

GS OTOH is a meta entity that moves your assets around in a never ending quest to find bigger fools willing to pay more than they did to acquire them. There is literally nothing useful about it and eventually it destroys the value of your assets once there are no more fools left. But it’s legal because they seek out and fund, make rich (IPO), or (apparently) pay off enough socially important people that the practice is allowed to slide. And it’s sure nice when you get the modest kick backs to your account, amirite? Let’s just hope the supply of fools never runs out and we can keep growing money forever. Not an unsafe bet either, unfortunately.

Put another way, what the corporations you cited do is called produce goods. It’s the economic model in many places and despit capitalism having its own set of problems at least companies produce things that people pay for. There are many useful services the financial industry supplies but here we are talking about the guts of how the investment banking subsector operates. If the industry was honest 2008 wouldn’t have happened. When was the last time Tesla royally fucked over your personal assets?