Why is investment banking particularly resented?

0:00There are basically two types of banking. There are more than two, but let's take that as a generalization. The sort of investment, the loan bank, where the banker saves up money and lends it out, like the Medici's used to do. We hear about Fugers or Medici's in the Middle Ages or Renaissance period. These were loan bankers. They saved out money in various enterprises and they loaned them out. This is perfectly legitimate, magnificent, productive and all that. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. The investment bankers are sort of like that in the sense that they also will save out money and lend it out or borrow money from other people and re-lend it as experts. There's also nothing wrong with that. With this exception, this important exception which enters into our story, namely the investment bankers who are essentially underwrite security issues, stocks and bonds, Throughout the modern history, one of their major sources of profit is from government.

1:00In other words, government issues bonds, and investment bankers underwrite them, buy them, resell them, or underwrite them. So this brings investment bankers into, hip-deep into government, and also hip-deep into politics, since they help finance government deficits. And as a result of that, investment bankers play a very state-hizing, if you can use that term, influence in modern history, manipulating governments, putting one group in power, taking another group out of power, and so forth and so on. In other words, the problem with investment bankers is that since they underwrite government bonds to a large extent, they become hip-deep in government.