Yeah true, Wall St bankers provide the service of capital allocation and liquidity (and in a perfect world, they would be allocating capital efficiently, but th

Yeah true, Wall St bankers provide the service of capital allocation and liquidity (and in a perfect world, they would be allocating capital efficiently, but that's a story for another day). However I think what rankles people is three things (and most of these were touched on in the article): 1. They don't risk their own money. The true capitalist risks his own money for some productive enterprise, and is rewarded if it comes off, or walks away with nothing if it doesn't. Most investment banker chiefs walk away with millions even if they run the company into the ground. 2. They don't produce anything tangible. Ultimately they just move money around. It's worth something, but multi-million dollar salaries? Probably not. Also, the things they produce don't have visible impacts on normal people unless it goes belly up. 3. The intrinsic value of an investment banker's production is arguably a lot lower compared to how much they are compensated. I'm not going to go into this, but how much is capital allocation intrinsically worth? In my opinion, the work they do is probably more comparable to the value of a tax accountant. The article was about why people hate bankers. You've argued why the market values them so highly, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the vitriol of the common man is unjustified.