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This Bloomberg chart on financial industry profits prompts Paul Kedrosky to snark that it just goes to show that “even the worst bankers struggle to find ways to lose money when short rates are zero, the yield curve is steep, and credit is tight.”

But I think that’s mistaken. Wall Street is only full of bad bankers if you think the role of bankers is to provide efficient financial services to the rest of the economy. If you adopt the more correct attitude that the role of bankers is to make lots of money for bankers, then America has the best bankers in the world. And they’re proving it yet again.