“The finance industry is a grift,” is the online headline the New York Times slapped on Oren Cass’s nearly 3,300-word-long screed. In print in the Sunday Times, where the Cass article covered the entire front page of the Sunday opinion section and the better part of two inside pages (a “double truck,” as it’s known), the headline was dialed back to “How the Capitalists Broke Capitalism” and “The Self-Enriching Money Machine: Banks used to build things. Now they just move money around and squeeze us all for profit.”
Maybe, at least for print, the Times editors were exercising some rare self-restraint. Perhaps, upon reflection, “the finance industry is a grift” was a bit of a sweeping overgeneralization for a company whose corporate board of directors includes John W. Rogers Jr., whose Times company bio describes him as “founder, chairman, co-chief executive officer and chief investment officer, of Ariel Investments, LLC, an institutional money management and mutual fund firm, as well as a trustee of Ariel Investment Trust, an investment company.” Or maybe it was impolitic for a company whose latest proxy statement listed more than 30 percent of its Class A shares—considerably more than held by the Ochs Sulzberger family—in the hands of the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, T. Rowe Price Investment Management Inc., and Farallon Capital Partners LLC and affiliated entities.
That the online headline implicitly impugned the integrity of the Times‘s own director and shareholders apparently wasn’t enough to give editors at the Times pause about publishing the rest of the piece. Too bad, because it is riddled with falsehoods, tendentious reasoning, and sloppy thinking.
One misleading claim is Cass’s complaint that the financial sector “attracts the highest share of top talent from top schools, in part by offering the highest compensation.” For proof he offers hyperlinks to data from Stanford and Harvard business schools. That’s cherry-picking. At Chicago Booth, 36.7 percent of the class went into consulting, compared to 31.6 percent in finance. At Duke Fuqua School of Business, 34 percent went into consulting and 20.9 percent into finance. At Dartmouth Tuck, 41 percent went into consulting and 27 percent into finance. At Michigan Ross, 33.5 percent went into consulting and 19.5 percent went into finance. Data from those schools show higher total initial compensation in consulting. Even at Harvard Business School, the recent trends cast doubt on Cass’s narrative; in the class of 2025, tech jobs went up to 22 percent from 16 percent the year before, and private equity jobs went down to 14 percent from 19 percent the year before. Career choice of Harvard MBA graduates is known as a contrary indicator; in 2008, just before the great financial crisis, 40 percent of the class went into finance. The data listings are for salaries immediately out of business school; for tech founders the long-term riches can far exceed compensation in the financial sector; ask Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Larry Ellison. Three of those four are college dropouts, which calls into question Cass’s notion that the top talent can be found in graduating MBA classes.
The mountain of misleading claims and half-truths is seductive because it taps into deep cultural roots, both Marxist—Karl Marx’s distinction between exploitative “capital” and virtuous, productive labor—and religious—Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the Temple. And Cass also blames “capitalists” for decisions—moving manufacturing overseas, the rise of private equity—that were really political or nonprofit, such as President Clinton’s decision to open up trade with China and public pension funds and university and foundation endowments increasing allocations to private equity.
Along the way, Cass gives short shrift to the many useful things that the financial industry does that are not a grift. Those things include helping many Americans save for retirement, accumulate home equity, and finance purchases; and financing the operations of many businesses with debt and stock sales. Cass is dismissive of “debt refinancings,” but some of us are old enough to remember the 2008 credit crunch when businesses had trouble issuing commercial paper. Plenty of people lost their jobs, and some lost their houses, in that crisis. Debt refinancing is nothing to take for granted.
Whatever froth there is in finance—whether it is private equity or hedge funds—is being ruthlessly wrung out by the very markets of which Cass is so contemptuous. It’s the markets that provide the price signals that let Cass cast his aspersions.
His policy solutions are likely to create their own problems. He writes, “We should establish regulations to curtail the riskiest and most convoluted financial activities.” Yet excessive regulation of the banks is what pushed activity in the first place to the “unregulated lenders” Cass complains about. In the race between regulators and regulated, the regulated will always have an edge—better information, the ability to capture regulators. That’s why allowing markets to self-regulate is usually best. The unregulated newspapers always want to regulate everyone else.
Cass’s proposal to ban stock buybacks would push firms to deploy capital in less efficient ways—such as paying taxable dividends, or empire-building with acquisitions. His idea to rewrite the bankruptcy laws “so that when companies go belly up, workers and their communities get to join the line for compensation ahead of the lenders who financed the mess” is a recipe to drive up the costs of capital, erode property rights, and distort incentives. Why would any union ever make any concession in any future contract negotiation if the workers wind up owning the company if they force it to default on debt?
Cass’s proposal for social shunning of people who take jobs in the financial sector is gross. He writes, “We must be willing to say that the hedge fund managers have no clothes and their parading about is an unpleasant sight for us all. Your daughter has taken a job at Blackstone? My condolences.” Blackstone isn’t a hedge fund. It’s a company that’s been built by hard work. In July 2025, one of its top employees was gunned down in the lobby. Might Oren Cass muster the decency to wait at least until Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner’s family is finished saying kaddish for the 43-year-old shot in her office building before Cass starts crapping all over the moral judgment of young women who choose to follow in her footsteps? The unpleasant sight here is Oren Cass parading his own lack of self-awareness.
In the print New York Times, the article is illustrated with pigs, gold coins, and a horned devil. Where would the Times be if, when it was at $3 a share during the financial crisis, lenders had not stepped up to provide runway—even at high interest rates—in a way that allowed the Ochs Sulzberger family to retain control? It’s convenient enough to denounce bankers or hedge fund managers as pigs or devils when business is good, when you’ve got Hewlett Foundation money at your back, or when you’re a sixth-generation Ochs Sulzberger heir. For the rest of us who are still building or rebuilding our fortunes and remember when lenders were not lending—well, we’re less inclined to insult the bankers, and more inclined to be nice and polite and grateful with the knowledge that we might, someday, need their help.
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