Recessions from 1900-1920 - seven Recessions from 2000-2020 - two The numbers get far bigger for the former if you go back to say 1880 versus 1980. Oh, and we have the highest level of GDP per capita and wealth overall as we've ever had. Not that we can't do a much better job of wealth equality, but if every company had to be a mom and pop we'd look a lot like India, where pretty much every company is a mom and pop. There are slimy and corrupt bankers (and lawyers and doctors and entrepreneurs and soccer moms for that matter!) but banking has indisputably played a huge role in you having what you have today. At the very least the assertion that they cause more frequent financial collapses is demonstrably false.
I said more frequent financial collapses. 2 in twenty years is really only counting full-blown recessions, and misses the rather frequent unexplainable destruction of wealth that suddenly recovers (2018), the flash crashes (May 2010, April 2013, Oct. 2016 (pound), Jan 2019 (yen)). These are historically unprecedented and can be explained simply by financial black magic and piss poor algorithms. It also doesn't count the collapse in 2000 during the dot-com bust (caused by absolutely fabricated company values - we are seeing this again today), nor the short but significant collapse in 1990-1991. Do you know they are now securitizing student loan debt? These idiots never learn! I'd argue we can thank heavy financial regulation and an increase in individual trading through discount brokers, rather than banksters, for a decrease in total per-decade recessions. Most of us are still waiting for an actual banker to go to prison for 2007-2009. If you want to improve the look of banksters how about we start making them atone for their sins instead of letting them reap record profits on the backs of the rest of us. Modern financial wizardry will leave us all broke. Yet, as they continue to leech value from the people who are trying to earn money in the market the honest way, they will continue to reward themselves handsomely for the privilege.
With all due respect, they had a bunch of multi-year recessions a hundred years ago that we didn't have. Recessions, the things that actually impact real non-banker people by the millions with real personal financial pain. Back then it was the "you're not getting enough to eat today" kind of pain. You're asserting that somehow a yen flash crash is not only equivalent but worse than that, for anyone let alone your average dude? That's absolutely absurd!
She went to Chicago. Very few of her colleagues started businesses. Most went to banking and consulting. Since then they have spread out but mostly to corporations or growth stage startups. I would consider PE an VC guys to be the same as bankers. They happen to be the successful ones. My joke to her was there seemed to be three career options for a newly minted MBA: Banking, Consulting, and Failure.
Yeah, if you consider buy-side as bankers then they definitely do skew higher so we're pretty much in agreement. Don't imagine there are many failures out of Chicago!