[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?