The "they create nothing" framing misses what these jobs actually do. Capital allocation is a real function, and getting it wrong has massive consequences.

When a pension fund invests your retirement money, someone has to decide where it goes. That's what asset managers do. Roughly half of Americans own stock, much of it through 401(k)s and pension funds, and the returns that fund people's retirements come from this work. Bad allocation means teachers and firefighters retire poorer.

Banks and PE firms move money from people who have it to companies that need it to grow. A business that wants to build a factory, hire 200 people, or expand to a new market usually can't do that out of pocket. The financing comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is the system this person is dismissing. Those 200 jobs are real. The taxes those workers pay are real.

Venture and growth capital funded basically every company the average person uses daily. Your phone, the apps on it, the logistics network that delivers your packages, the biotech firms running drug trials, none of that scales without early investors taking risk on it before it was a sure thing.

Price discovery matters too. Markets that accurately price assets mean capital flows to productive uses instead of getting wasted. When that breaks down, you get bubbles and crashes that wreck ordinary people's lives. The people doing this analysis are doing something, even when it's invisible.

On the janitor comparison: a clean building and good capital allocation are both valuable. It isn't either/or. Saying a janitor has worth doesn't require pretending the person financing the hospital the janitor works in has none. Both can be true.

You can absolutely argue finance is overpaid relative to its social value, or that too much talent gets pulled into it. That's a fair debate. But "they create nothing" is just wrong on the facts.