Inside Job: Nailed My Problem With Finance

Kevin and I watched Inside Job last night, and I have a feeling it will be fodder for a few posts.  But it's just too lovely of a day outside to sit around the house, so just a short thought for now.  As I was Googling the film last night, I came across this interview with the filmmaker, where he succinctly summarized my fundamental problem with Lehman Brothers (when I worked there) and with the financial industry as a whole:

I don’t have a problem with people getting wealthy if they work hard, contribute to society and do valuable things. There are people in Silicon Valley who are enormously wealthy. But for the most part they are enormously wealthy because they did something useful and valuable.

The problem here is that in finance people can get enormously wealthy by causing enormous damage to many other people. And that hasn’t been stopped. That’s part of why I am concerned that this could happen again in another decade.

I mean, that's really the crux of it, isn't it? If you invent something new, or start a restaurant, or shine people's shoes, you're doing something useful. In finance, you're really just taking the valuable work of other people and figuring out how you can skim off the top. It's a whole industry dedicated to being professional leeches. Yet, somehow, when they teeter on the brink of collapse, we bail them out, which we don't do for any of the folks who make a real contribution to society. Sad.