I came accross a lecture by Munger, apparently an old timer of the financial world, and one of the things he said reminded me of your criticism of where the money in wall street actually comes from.

Here is the relevant part:

Galbraith invented the word "bezzle" to describe the amount of undisclosed embezzlement, so I invented the word "febezzlement": the functional equivalent of embezzlement. This happened after I asked the question "Is there a functional equivalent of embezzlement?"  I came up with a lot of wonderful affirmative answers.  Some were in investment management. After all I'm near investment management.  I considered the billions of dollars totally wasted in
the course of investing common stock portfolios for American owners.  As long as the market keep going up, the guy who's wasting all this money doesn't feel it, because he's looking at these steadily rising values.  And to the guy who is getting the money for investment advice, the money looks like well earned income, when he's really selling detriment for money, surely the functional equivalent of undisclosed embezzlement.