I have met people who sincerely seem to believe that if an entity makes money then it must be societally useful because otherwise the market would not reward them with profits.
This seems to me like a self-help belief for people in these lucrative but ultimately not very meaningful positions.
This is patently not true. The USSR had no financial markets and engaged in the production high value goods. Whether it did so more efficiently than its capitalist competition is another matter, and I believe the answer is likely no, but it clearly did more than subsistence farming.
The broader economic situation of the USSR is a very different question to whether or not they were able to progress beyond subsistence farming. One is a relatively nuanced topic, the other is a question that can be answered trivially by someone with the most basic historical knowledge, or even knowledge of modern Russia which clearly has not developed from subsistence farming to a developed economy in the time between 1991 and today.
Also, even if some financialization is beneficial that does not mean all of it is. Too much can be very harmful.
Facilitating value creation is value creation.
Nevertheless it is not exactly the same. A carpenter’s apprentice is useful only when paired with his master. He facilitates the carpenter in his value creation but lacks the skills to do anything on his own.
Unlike the apprentice however, finance never actually learns the stuff.
Again, all of this has it’s uses and all, it’s just gotten a bit out of hand in terms of gambling like behaviour and the push the financial world creates towards harmful monopolies.