For the Love of Money

I think the author has suffered from a lot of psychological pain stemming from his childhood, and I can sympathize a lot with that. I think he really did have a wealth addiction, like he describes.

However, that doesn't generalize to the entire industry. People (especially men) like money and power because of the benefits they brings. It doesn't have to be an addiction. Furthermore, the idea that it would take an addiction to wealth not to see how immoral the finance industry is, is reliant on having very specific (and wrong, in my opinion) political views.

There was an article a while back that discussed how most people's perception of what is "enough" wealth is always ~30% more than what they currently have, be it thousands or millions of dollars. Unfortunately I can't find the article at the moment, but the point still stands that, to a certain extent, wealth addiction has become embedded in our culture and we are taught to seek it from a young age. So to say that the financial industry is somehow immune to something everyone else around them is suffering from seems to be pretty disingenuous.

I think his overarching point is that these people (by and large) do NOT do anything 'significant' with their millions. They don't even participate in a part of society that is useful beyond making ridiculous amounts of money.

That was why I believe he highlights that he has started speaking to the less fortunate and trying to 'make a difference' towards the end of the article.

Edit: Not to say this guy still doesn't sound like a total twat. Look at how he ends with a sales pitch...

I've worked in finance. There are all types. Sure, there are asshole alpha traders who whine about $2 million bonuses. Those guys are pretty uncommon, they're disliked even in spite of their P&L, and no one helps them when they get unlucky. There are also people who don't think or live very differently from respectable professors-- except who have $12 million in their bank account instead of $12. There some pathological "wealth addicts" in finance, but not that many; and there are far more in the VC-funded startup world. (VC-istan is essentially Wall Street with a lower talent level and worse ethics.)

I used to think it was a negative that Europe doesn't have the same "class" mobility. If you're rich in Germany or England, you're still considered middle-class. Politicians don't worship you, your kids still have to work hard if they are to attend good schools, et cetera. (The "upper classes" are hereditary aristocracies that have lost 80-95% of their wealth, privilege, and relevance.) You can't become upper-class if you weren't born into it, but the flip side of that is that middle-class people can rise quite high. (There's less mobility in social class, but more in terms of things that actually matter-- economic well-being, access to education, etc.) The sickness of the US is that we unify wealth, power, privilege, fame, and social connections by creating an efficient market through which people can trade one for another. Instead of having a society where some people have more money and some have less, we have this toxic arrangement where some people are just implicitly held to be universally better.

The issue for the OP (who sounds like a self-indulgent twat, to be honest) is that he learned the hard way that making more money didn't make him a better person-- at all. It didn't make him smarter, happier, or anything else. He met his God and saw vapor.

The sad thing is that he's still better off than any of us. If he wants to start a hedge fund tomorrow, or raise a $5-million seed round for whatever project he wants to take on, he's got the credibility to do it. If he doesn't feel like working hard, he could probably use his VC connections as a cash cow by funding young startup kids on a shoestring while taking an unreasonable percentage in equity (although that's been done before).

You're seriously attempting to imply that there were no loans/lending of money before 1993 (when the derivatives markets became a 'thing')?

Or are you just talking about the financial sector in general (and even so there were loans long before that.)

Wall St. does not exist so people can get loans to purchase houses/cars... You may be missing some points about loans vs trading here...