They're cutting the size of their coffee cups to save money, hardly secret rulers of the world stuff, is it?
That's the same Goldman Sachs that made a profit of $2.7 billion in the first quarter of this year alone:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/apr/19/goldman-sachs...
They had an excellent Q1.
They had a very pedestrian Q2.
The rumor is they're having an atrocious Q3.
1) attend college and pay for it later 2) buy a car to get to work 3) raise capital to start your business 4) Allows people to enter positions which cut down the risk to their business from external variables like currencies and commodity prices 5) Allows people to do stupid things 6) Allows people to travel light without having to carry loads of cash 7) Enables stupidity
If you start holding the enablement of stupidity against industries then there will be very few left that dont enable stupidity in some form or another.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
We need to learn lessons from what happened and help prevent it from occurring in the future but lets not go overboard here.
I was involved in a conversation with a fellow programmer who was complaining about how much investment bankers made, and that they didn't do any real work.
I pointed out to him, that as programmers, all we do is think and type. We have the "luxury" of sitting in a chair all day long and only moving our fingers.
There are teachers, police officers, and coal miners that think the exact same thing about us as well. So let's not start throwing rocks here at other people. We should just be happy that we're so well paid to be doing something we love. No need to start saying that investment bankers or traders aren't doing anything "useful". I'm sure their clients would disagree.
if you define 'usefulness' in terms of 'alleviating some form of human suffering' then i think your point vanishes: prop traders don't have clients. they make money for themselves alone.
Not sure why my comment was downvoted, if the secret of ruling the world is using smaller coffee cups, anyone can do it...