The growth of the financial industry has been a boon for its highly-paid managers. According to New York University economist Thomas Philippon, who contributes one of the most striking chapters in Rethinking the Financial Crisis, “total compensation of financial intermediaries (profits, wages, salary and bonuses) as a fraction of GDP is at an all-time high, around 9% of GDP.”

To give those numbers some context, consider that 9 percent of US GDP last year was about $1.4 trillion—an unprecedented windfall for America’s capitalist class. “What does society get in return? Or, in other words, what does the finance industry produce?”

Historically, the unit cost of intermediation has been somewhere between 1.3% and 2.3% of assets. However, this unit cost has been trending upward since 1970 and is now significantly higher than in the past. In other words, the finance industry of 1900 was just as able as the finance industry of 2010 to produce loans, bonds and stocks, and it was certainly doing it more cheaply. This is counter-intuitive, to say the least. How is it possible for today’s finance industry not to be significantly more efficient than the finance industry of John Pierpont Morgan?

The short answer is that Wall Street, for the last thirty years or so, has been skimming prodigiously from the top. The graph above shows how the total economic cost of financial intermediation grew from under 2 percent in 1870 to nearly 6 percent before the stock market collapsed in 1929. It grew slowly throughout the postwar expansion, reaching 5 percent in 1980. Then, beginning during the deregulatory years of the Reagan administration, the money flowing to financial intermediaries skyrocketed, rising to almost 9 percent of GDP in 2010.

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/graph-how-the-financial-sector-consumed-americas-economic-growth/