Comment by bruce511
3 months ago
You miss the point. why the low view exists is irrelevant.
Frankly, while I acknowledge their necessity, I have a poor (default) view of both bankers and lawyers. I don't see them as bad people, but people in their professions do many bad things.
If my son brings a banker home as a prospective mate, well, let's say they're not earning status points from their profession.
You (may have) and I (do) have respect for people in tough jobs like see workers. Doesn't mean my mom wouldn't prefer I date a nice doctor. My point being that social respect does not come with your personal respect.
One thing to consider about investment bankers: Many of them do pretty mundane work, like work on non-national/federal gov't and corporate bond issuance. (In most countries, national/federal gov't can directly issue bonds without investment bankers.) There is literally trillions of dollars of these bonds issued each year (usually to roll-over maturing debt) across all highly developed nations. It is fundamental to modern capitalism. I would estimate that 99.5% of these bond deals use "vanilla term sheets" (my term) -- literally copy and modify from the last deal. And, the buyers of these bonds are 99% institutional: our pension funds, mutual funds, and bond ETFs.
Also, secondary equity issuance is pretty non-controversial, and an important fund raising option for publicly-listed corporations.
> You miss the point. why the low view exists is irrelevant.
It's very much relevant to this conversation. Without specific negative factors like a "predatory" aspect, increasing earnings will increase prestige. ATC doesn't have those factors.
They brought up bankers and lawyers in response to someone asking "Which very highly paid job does not command respect in society? I can’t think of any"
So yes it is irrelevant in the specific context of that sub-conversation. Which isn't to say that your point arguing why that might not be applicable to ATCs isn't also a relevant thing to say to being the conversation back to the main topic of this thread.
It's not directly relevant to that preceeding comment, but it's relevant to the reason those were being brought up a couple commments higher.
Being relevant to either of those is enough to make it overall be: relevant.