What Does Wall Street Do for You?

Hating Wall Street is an American tradition that dates back even to the days when Thomas Jefferson cursed that money lover Alexander Hamilton. And for centuries, the complaints about it have largely stayed the same: It does nothing! It creates chaos! It’s a parasite that sucks hardworking Americans dry! (Or something to that effect.) But these are distortions of a fundamentally beneficial business. The country’s largest investment banks, commercial banks and a few big insurance companies (what we generally refer to as Wall Street) play the crucial role of intermediation — matching borrowers with lenders. Most of the time, the industry does this extremely well (though in the case of matching homeowners’ debt to the global financial system, too enthusiastically). Perhaps the best way to really appreciate what Wall Street does is to imagine life without it.

A list of life without Wall Street from the NY Times…

THE POOR WOULD STAY POOR

THERE WOULD BE NO MIDDLE CLASS

LOTS OF AWESOME THINGS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN

Check out the article in full here…

Read Naked Capitalism’s take on the story here…

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