>But we now have clear evidence that the real >cost to society of these behaviors is not in >billions but in trillions of dollars.
I will introduce you to a piece of advice I give to newbie bankers (I headhunt maths geeks for banks).
*Every cent* a banker makes is by providing some sort of service. Some of it is obvious stuff like interest, fees for advice or moving the stuff from one place to another, or carry out a specific trade for a customers personal holdings.
But liquidity and price discovery are services as well, even if you are not allowed to know who you are providing them to.
A major problem at the moment is the lack of liquidity and price discovery, we have in effect regressed to the 1950s.
To take your analogy of the US army, it provides security to many people who it does not know by name, but who still exist. It is also in the nature of armies that they provide security to people who not only do not thank them, but fight them for doing so.
Of course like armies, banks screw up sometimes. Armies attack the wrong enemies, banks buy the wrong stocks or lend money to the wrong people.
>The average bonus on WS less than a year after these companies were going bankrupt was over half a million dollars.
That simply untrue. Have you been watching Fox news ?
>Lay 6,000 people off and get a 100,000,000 dollar bonus. But you can only buy 5 or 6 tv's and 3 or 4 cars. So overall demand for product is reduced.
That's true, but you have not asked what else can be done with the money ? Most gets spent or taxed.
>I now have 4 friends laid off and three who are on the edge of being laid off.
I've been let go myself, more than once. Not nice. no one has ever found a solution to this. Most of the tries have left a notable % of the population dead.
>It's like ignoring the price of having the U.S. Army all over the world protecting oil interests in the real price of oil.
Again the numbers do not support this.
A critical reason the US has had such a poor time in Iraq is that nearly all the US armed forces have been doing something else.
There is not much oil in Germany, Hawaii, Afghanistan, Korea, Japan and many other places US troops are to be found in serious numbers. US nuclear forces have not been used either...
>When are we going to stop all this behavior by 2% of the population which is hurting the other 98%?
So your behaviour has no bad consequences ?
You're an American, so I'd bet real money that even though I earn more than you, both of my cars do vastly better gas mileage. indeed I mostly use public transport. Do you walk every journey you can ?
Doubt it.
We screwed up, no question.
But look at what we did before, and what we will do again.
Without modern finance there would be no Chinese or Indian economic miracles. Growth on the planet would have been 1-2% less every year. We have taken half a billion people out of abject poverty.
The screwup means we will have to wait longer for Africa, and that's tragic, but don't kid yourself that aid does anything but stop kids dying in such awful numbers.
The fix is growth. You need credit for that, and you can no more run a 21st economy with 19th century banking than you can run it with 19th century transport or mechanical adding machines.
Technology will cause shit to happen. Planes crash and spread swine flu (though not at the same time). Mechanisation means industrial killing machines, and modern medicine meant that GW Bush did not die of his chemical abuses.
Phototography brought child porn, and that in some years cars kill more people than guns on this
planet.
>Corporations have been hijacked by the executive class for their own benefit- not societies benefit.
I interview bankers for a living, and will share that they come from a wider range of backgrounds than any type of people I interact with. There is a stronger negative correlation with parental income. The % of first / second generation immigrants is high.
What you have here is a meritocracy, which is of course, not a popular form of social organisation.
And yes, I'm a pimp for bankers, I know how grossly imperfect it is, you got a better one you can point to ?
