Ezra Klein: Worth Quoting: Obama on a Smaller Financial Sector

[flpoljunkie]

WORTH QUOTING: OBAMA ON A SMALLER FINANCIAL SECTOR.

From his interview with David Leonhardt:

THE PRESIDENT: What I think will change, what I think was an aberration, was a situation where corporate profits in the financial sector were such a heavy part of our overall profitability over the last decade. That I think will change. And so part of that has to do with the effects of regulation that will inhibit some of the massive leveraging and the massive risk-taking that had become so common.

Now, in some ways, I think it’s important to understand that some of that wealth was illusory in the first place.

So we won’t miss it?

THE PRESIDENT: We will miss it in the sense that as a consequence of 25-year-olds getting million-dollar bonuses, they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and that waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious. And so some of the dynamic of the financial sector will have some trickle-down effects, particularly in a place like Manhattan.

But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.

That doesn’t mean, though, that Silicon Valley is still not a huge, critical, important part of our economy, and Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s. It just won’t be half of our economy. And that means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. And I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design.

Posted by Ezra Klein on April 30, 2009 12:00 PM

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2009&base_name=worth_quoting_obama_on_a_small

[Turbineguy]

1. When the group of people

who put investors together with investment cost the same as the total value of the new investments, that's a problem.