Why is the financial sector so widely disliked ?

[Swirlythingy2025]

Been watching the show Billions and from watching it seems Hedge funds, investment banks, and the stock market often face accusations of greed and serving only the elite.

Is the stock market rigged against ordinary people, or do we fail to grasp its complexities?

my personal view is society needs its Ax capital or its Bobby Axelrods of society

I think it's because it's increasingly predatory - it's helping the very wealthiest mop up all the assets, including homes, and sucking the wealth out of the middle classes. That's a very simplistic view of it, I know, but fewer and fewer people seem to be benefiting from the financial sector's machinations

Green-eyed monster, IMO.

that i do wonder if its a part of it

ill admit after watching the show, it does seem once your rich as long as your careful then the rich get richer

It's about making money. Lots of it in order to enrich the financial sector and shareholders. Watch The Big Short or Margin Call or Wall St. Of course we hope that ordinary people win in some way eg pension fund/ISA etc but altruism isn't required. If they can make money, the sector will. Short the pound, buy/sell everything? Someone will do it esp if they can get rich. Stock market is there for everyone but you need to study it and access eg a broker. Having some money to gamble/invest is necessary.

A lack of understanding of it and jealousy of those who are making big bucks.

that said, many (but not all) of those making money are doing so because the markets are not open to ordinary people.

I have an economics degree.

very few people understsand the stock market. Finance is complex.

but having said that there certainly are a lot of greedy people in that sector.

if you can understand it (and you do need to be taught, it’s not simple enough to pick up on your own) you can do quite well yourself.

@Pedallleur of course you don't need a broker to access the markets.

Re being taught well yes you would need to do research as when looking into any new venture but depending what you want from it ie simple investing you don't need anyone to teach it as an adult. Having said that basic investment does need to be taught.

when i watched the big short in order to short the housing market with the credit default swaps you needed to be apart of x something to be able to buy the swaps

thats what seems lacking in general education is financial knowledge

the big short and margin call got me into researching the stock market plus "greed is good" from the wall street film and the finance arena, im a poor person but i have intrest in various subjects and thanks to google, youtube etc i can at least study the industrys

the one show id recommend to you is the tv series called industry

the show im currently watching is billions with bobby axelrod

It’s because we hear the stories of super rich people making money out of events that make ordinary people poorer eg Rees-Mogg making money when sterling fell after the Brexit vote, Trump’s friends making silly money when the markets dropped last week, Covid contracts worth billions given away and taxpayers paying it back for the next few decades…

Basically the rich get richer at an alarming rate while ordinary people stay still. It’s an understandable jealousy thing.

basically shorting the market and getting a return because it went the way they thought it would.
ill admit its like disaster capitalism.
not the better side of the finance markets

Because we bailed the banks out in 2008 and that caused enormous widening inequality.

It's been the same for millennia - the money-changers in the temple??
Matthew 21:12-13

People don't much like the financial sector because financiers use other people's money (bank balance/deposits/pensions/investments/shares) to make money, and then they keep most of the profits for themselves.

I think some of it is about the kind of people who one often finds in the financial sector. There is a way of talking about their jobs that is - sorry to say - just really irritating. It often goes with a look and a voice. Yes it is a sort of othering of probably perfectly reasonable people but that is what Brits are like.

Gambling with other people’s money.
Profiting from success, insured against failure.
Making money by having spare money, which is unattainable for many.

Ordinary people see their own circumstances being negatively impacted by what ‘the markets’ are doing. It’s out of their control. So money people can make everyday Joe poor, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Also, if you nurse, teach, or build things, it’s easy to see the value of your job.
Not so easy to see the value of someone who moves money around.

And I say all that ^^ as someone whose husband and son play the markets.

Many reasons.

My personal bug bear, people with huge salaries that complain about the salaries in the public sector. A CEO of a large hospital will earn less than a mid range ish finance person in some parts of financial services but could get sent to prison for corporate manslaughter.

@CherryBlossomPie from my reading of The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis Paperback – 22 Feb. 2015
by Ben S. Bernanke (Author)

i think was that book the public did get a good return on investment.
that said it was like someone put the financial market on monster energy drink with all those mortgage backed securitites that were being sold

I've worked in investment banking for 25 years - the stereotyping is really unpleasant. It's simply nothing like Industry, or Wolf of Wall Street and most of us, actually want good outcomes for our clients. My client base is social housing - banks lend them billions of pounds so they can build more affordable houses. My expertise is in helping them manage their exposure to higher interest rates so the cost of servicing that debt doesn't sky rocket - so they can carry on building more affordable housing. I work long days, over 14hrs a day last week when markets went insane, and I do that because my clients needed my help. Not because I'm trying to line my own pockets.

do the bobby axelrods exist or the eg wolf on wall street or are they more the rare characters than the average characters ?

very true points especially 2008 era

Yes - generally the ordinary Joe or Jean is not eligible to invest in sophisticated products like swaps. Probably quite rightly so because they are highly risky

ill admit trying to even understand it myself was like omg, it was like the scene when they rolled the paper on the desk that showed the financial forumla that taylor mason i think it was was going to use

There's a lot of looking down on other sectors from people in the financial world - and I've heard it with my own ears even from people who are my friends - simply because others are not wealth creators: except they are, they are cogs in the machine of wealth creation. Keeping a population healthy impacts wealth creation, innovation impacts wealth creation, educating people and doing research impacts wealth creation, entertaining people impacts wealth creation, getting people to and from work impacts wealth creation. From some of the comments I've heard, you'd think people were sitting around doing fuck all instead of their actual jobs, which kind of keep the lights on at a national level.