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  • Winston Smi...: 
  • Comments (69)
  You have Andrew Hall, a trader, in a battle to once again make $100 million a year, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone making $702,440,573, Lloyd Blankfein making $72 million, and Steven Schonfeld, owner of a trading firm collecting $200 million. And what did they produce? Wealth for the shareholder? Not likely, most profits (or lack thereof) paid the company executives. What good did they bestow to humanity? Nothing! If anything, their net effect was negative. Whether it was creating financial instruments that contributed to this liquidity mess or trading oil contracts that they never had any interest in taking delivery for. Meanwhile, the average human saw their fuel consumption cost double. Why? Just so someone could play a high-stakes game and make more than a lottery winner in a single year. At what cost has this excess damaged humanity? What if all this effort and brain power actually went toward a noble cause? Would we as humans be better off today? Will the person that finds a cure for cancer or figures out how to land a human on Mars be paid quite as handsomely over their lifetime what these guys made in one year? Doubtful. What has humanity come to that the highest paid are those that shuffle paper?

  Sep 18 11:44 AM | Link | Reply
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  • Annualgain: 
  • Comments (103)
  •  • StockTalk (3)
  High IQ's on Wall Street? Where?

  Sep 18 11:51 AM | Link | Reply
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  • Witchy: 
  • Comments (9)
  I've perused lists of who made how much in the cities of Italy during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Cardinals dominated the lists. But bankers were on the rise. Lesson: the leaders of the dominant mythos reap the most rewards. Capitalists are our cardinals.

  Sep 18 12:03 PM | Link | Reply
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  • Winston Smi...: 
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  "When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed." -- Ayn Rand

  Sep 18 12:13 PM | Link | Reply
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  • akapital: 
  • Comments (139)
  I concur with Annualgain. You are making a big assumption that there is in fact high IQs on Wall St. I think instead what you have is a lot of well intentioned people trying to make alot of money for themselves. Some of them may have high IQs.
  
  I think the question that you really want to ask is will big money shift from Wall St. to finanancially reward genius of other fields (teaching, science, new technologies, etc.)
  
  I do not believe that is likely however because of some very basic fundamental believes (that I don't personally share) of our society.
  
  For example, we live in a society that appears to financially rewards great sport talent over teachers. But upon further inspectiion who is actually doing the rewarding? The private sector is giving out the big rewards. But that does not mean that they are attracting the best talent. They are simply attracting people that want to make money. Meanwhile tax payers certainly do not want to pay teachers more money for teaching their kids.
  
  
  
  On Sep 18 11:51 AM Annualgain wrote:
  
  > High IQ's on Wall Street? Where?

  Sep 18 12:35 PM | Link | Reply