Study finds bankers are a net economic drain, while hospital cleaners add positive value.

[Alby_da_Wolf]

richardhutnik said:

Kasz216 said:

richardhutnik said:

Kasz216 said:

I'd consider the results a bit dubius.

Considering that banking is 1/10th England's economy.

Lets due some due diligence and look up the New Economics Forum...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economics_Foundation

Well... I think that pretty much sums it up pretty well.

You should really due some research before you post some of this stuff rather then just blindly beleiving it.

Do you believe an economy is healthy if 10% of it is based on banking?  If an economy were 50% banking, would that be healthy?

10% sure why not?

50%, No, i certaintly wouldn't shoot my economy in the head though and greatly ruin the lives of everyday people.  I'd diversify my economy first.

Diversification of the economy is critical.  It is important to see long-term trends going on.  As it is now, the percentage of the GDP has been increasingly involving the financial sector.  This article has a graph in it that shows this trend:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-friends-get-into-finance/ 

This is from the article:

 

An analysis of MIT’s graduate-employment data shows that the financial sector increased its hiring from 18 percent of its graduates in 2003 to 25 percent in 2006. So not only are the investment banks siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with financial gimmicks like CDOs; they are using our best engineering graduates to help them do it. This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing.

When most sectors of the economy grow, new companies are created. The authors found, however, that the finance sector is not driving firm formation; it is cannibalizing entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy by offering wage and skill premiums to individuals who might otherwise have started companies. It is also causing far greater volatility among publicly traded firms and a reduction in the quality of businesses started.

 

 

 

End result is there is no free lunch.  When a sector of the economy diverts away from innovation, into games of playing with making money off financial instruments that have already been sold, and don't raise money for start ups, and also don't properly fund new ventures, or come up with new ventures to begin with, you will end up with the future growth being shortened, and you see a trend where the financial sector continues to consume more and more of GDP.

I agree. Banks are businesses, so it's normal they do their interest. But their business is offering a service to others, keeping, managing and safely transferring money, and doing this they help creating new richness. But when they start doing more and more just their own interest, even destroying the richness of others to increase theirs own, the system rots. It's totally normal that companies compete with each other, but it's not normal that a company compete with its clients and betray their trust. In the best hypothesis there's conflict of interest, in the worst it could border or even actually be crime.