Somebody please remind me...just EXACTLY what does “investment banking” do for We the People?
I think I know what it does for the Feds...but how about the Feds employers?!!!
Back in the day, investment banking aided capital formation for businesses and was thus a useful service to the economy as a whole, and thereby indirectly to the citizenry as a whole.
There was a piece less than a year ago written by an investment banker who had resigned a post a Goldman Sachs, in which he lamented that the company had “lost its soul” and that the bankers now referred to clients as “muppets”. The problem, which I had seen from afar, and which that piece confirmed, is that our zeitgeist may be described as “the Era of Bad Stewards” (or as one wag here at FR suggested it be typeset “the Era of BAd STewARDS”): folks who have fiduciary responsibility for the goods of others (like investment bankers, corporate CEOs, Congressmen, university presidents, . . .) all now act as if their positions exist not to serve the good of others, but to enrich themselves. Once that zeitgeist permeates an investment bank, it not only doesn’t do anything for the public good — which was never the point, really — it doesn’t do anything for its clients or shareholders either.