C'mon. You've been on Hacker News three years. We're not like the rest of the internet.
Let's try this again. Pretend you're trying to convince Feynman that investment banking is a Good Thing. What specific points would you raise?
(No one would disagree that iPads / streaming video are good. We would, however, disagree on how much "investment banking" has contributed to their existence.)
In "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense", Patrick Robinson provides a pretty good example of a pretty useful thing that investment banks appear to do - providing liquidity in the market for distressed corporate bonds.
He gives an example of some airline that announces it has financial troubles - immediately people holding the bonds they issue are pretty keen to sell, pretty much at any price. The bank have had very smart researchers who spot that the airline looks like it will be in trouble and then estimate how much the airline is really worth and then buy at below this price (based on their assets - planes).
The people offloading the bonds are presumably pretty happy as they are worried they might be worthless and the bank is making some money off of the risk that their research might be wrong.
Sounds like a pretty fair way of making money to me.
"How is humanity better off by investment banking?"
Their clients think they provide an economically useful function - otherwise they wouldn't use them. Do businesses really need more justification to exist than that?
Also:
- The bank wasn't directly interacting with the airline, they were buying bonds from other organisations who were holding them
- Lots of people risk other peoples money - fund managers, pension companies, VCs, hedge funds etc. - with varying degrees of risk and exposure by the people actually doing the investing.
1) Money exists to serve humans. It doesn't exist for money's sake. The end goal is to help people. The airline helped people get from A to B. Dropbox helps people send files.
2) The people holding the bonds are still gamblers. Your example consists entirely of gamblers!
And how did the airline raise the money to buy its planes or Dropbox raise the capital it needed to expand?
Do you think the VCs who invested in Dropbox would do so if they knew that Dropbox would never allow itself to go public or be acquired?
By your definition, if I purchased Apple stock I would be "gambling" - Apple wouldn't see any of my money. In a certain respect I sort of agree with this, but it's also clear that when Apple went public the money raised was built on the expectation of future free trading in the stock so, as far as I can see, it is very difficult to divorce "investment" from "gambling".
Someone on here suggested having an asset limit for banks relative to GDP - if you look at RBS (largest company in world by assets) at $3.5 trillion then that might look a bit uncomfortable in the UK which has a GDP of quite a bit less ($2.173 trillion).
> What I mean is, that airplane example consists entirely of gamblers.
No, it doesn't. Either that, or everyone is a gambler.
Everything involves risk. The amount of risk tolerance is very context dependent and varies. For example, I'm much more willing to make an (inflation-adjusted) $10k "bet" now than I was 20 years ago. In another 20 years, I'll be less likely than I am now.
Let's try this again. Pretend you're trying to convince Feynman that investment banking is a Good Thing. What specific points would you raise?
(No one would disagree that iPads / streaming video are good. We would, however, disagree on how much "investment banking" has contributed to their existence.)