Does Investment Banking Make America Less Efficient?
Investment Banking promotes an efficient flow of capital (mergers, restructurings, etc).Buyside Investors direct capital to productive companies, which promotes economic efficiency. Arguments that financial industries always make money on someone else's dime are shortsighted. Financial services direct capital to efficient outcomes.
But recently I read this paper by Christiana Kneer which promotes an interesting idea about the brain-drain of finance. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_…) The paper (studying 13 countries) shows that financial deregulation often causes lower labor productivity in non-financial sectors. In other words, when the financial industry grows larger, it takes away talent from non-finance industries (and makes them less efficient).
Paired with the fact that financial production has outpaced "real" production over the past 20 years--is finance a parasite to the development of America's real economy? As far as a long-term macro prediction, how can America maintain real economic growth (which we obviously need to outpace other countries in research, tech, infrastructure, etc.) when the financial sector grows at a faster rate, and makes non-financial sectors less efficient?