At least 20+ years ago Wall Street mostly made money by making available tangible assets to the common investor -- facilitating IPOs and mergers aka "moving mon

At least 20+ years ago Wall Street mostly made money by making available tangible assets to the common investor -- facilitating IPOs and mergers aka "moving money around" does provide for efficient allocation of capital which in turn creates wealth over the long-term. I can understand the argument, then, that bankers are/were providing a service that is beneficial for society. In the last 10 years, though, IPOs have more or less dried up due to Sarbanes-Oxley and M&A activity is only slowly re-emerging. As a result, big banks make most of their profits from larger and riskier trading operations and pumping out intellectual gobledeegook like the CDOs that caused this whole mess. It's this "modern" intellectualized finance stuff that REALLY is just moving around paper junk for profit.