Apologies for the overreaction earlier. I did react a bit insultingly. It was an irritable reaction to a "stock statement" that I associate with idiots, which wasn't really called for in this context.
The stock statement in question is the dismissal of an enormous and critical industry as "value-less".
You link to a Rolling Stones article (by Matt Taibbi, who is a controversial journalist, who panders to the pseudo-libertarian crowds on reddit) which attacks Goldman Sachs for manipulating the US Fed (a fair point), and you use that as a justification for condemning investment banking as a whole.
Investment banking is a huge collection of professions which generally assists with one primary purposes: helping companies raise money. To dismiss that as valueless is clearly wrong. Surely, if anyone understands the value of being able to raise money, it must be startup founders. Investment banking exists to enable large corporations to raise money.
Some other purposes of investment banking include: hedging against risks (via derivates, for example, which you also dismiss), providing more advanced financial instruments (fyi, options, which you use to pay your employees, are derivatives too - and they wouldn't exist if investment bankers hadn't thought them up), market research (which has provided dubious value in the past, but that is an indictment of the global mega-banks, not of the research function, which is essential), market making (essential to provide a fluid, liquid market where people can actually exit), and many others.
When I first loaded up your site, it displayed with no CSS template, and looked like a craigslist post (I did not initially check the URL), and I checked the poster, and it was created 2 hours ago for the clear purpose of submitting this story, and it had a disproportionate number of upvotes for the weak point it was making, and it also made the above generalisation which, in my mind, categorised you directly as a reddit-style "omg banking is evil" type.
That led me (wrongly) to lump you in with the "idiots". Again, I apologise for that, it was an incorrect and rash overreaction - but some of the points above still stand. Hopefully now you understand my thinking better, though.
The stock statement in question is the dismissal of an enormous and critical industry as "value-less".
You link to a Rolling Stones article (by Matt Taibbi, who is a controversial journalist, who panders to the pseudo-libertarian crowds on reddit) which attacks Goldman Sachs for manipulating the US Fed (a fair point), and you use that as a justification for condemning investment banking as a whole.
Investment banking is a huge collection of professions which generally assists with one primary purposes: helping companies raise money. To dismiss that as valueless is clearly wrong. Surely, if anyone understands the value of being able to raise money, it must be startup founders. Investment banking exists to enable large corporations to raise money.
Some other purposes of investment banking include: hedging against risks (via derivates, for example, which you also dismiss), providing more advanced financial instruments (fyi, options, which you use to pay your employees, are derivatives too - and they wouldn't exist if investment bankers hadn't thought them up), market research (which has provided dubious value in the past, but that is an indictment of the global mega-banks, not of the research function, which is essential), market making (essential to provide a fluid, liquid market where people can actually exit), and many others.
When I first loaded up your site, it displayed with no CSS template, and looked like a craigslist post (I did not initially check the URL), and I checked the poster, and it was created 2 hours ago for the clear purpose of submitting this story, and it had a disproportionate number of upvotes for the weak point it was making, and it also made the above generalisation which, in my mind, categorised you directly as a reddit-style "omg banking is evil" type.
That led me (wrongly) to lump you in with the "idiots". Again, I apologise for that, it was an incorrect and rash overreaction - but some of the points above still stand. Hopefully now you understand my thinking better, though.