Cory "Pluralistic" Doctorow, the coiner of the term "enshittification", wrote an article about the uselessness of the finance sector. He refers to an article by John Lanchester.
Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."
The other 97% of finance is gambling.
And here are a couple quotes from the Lanchester's article, For Every Winner a Loser. He used selling mangoes as an example in his article.
In his indispensable guide to the current condition of the financial industry, Other People’s Money, published in 2015, John Kay talks about the state of the UK banking sector, whose assets then were about £7 trillion, four times the aggregate income of everyone in the country. But the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are mainly obligations to other financial institutions. Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total.’
The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.