Most of those harmless activities do not include trading stocks, bonds, derivatives and commodities.
Wall-Street is like a very powerful diesel engine, it generates enormous amounts of power and it generates enormous amounts of pollution. Hard to get the one without the other.
Seriously, can you please stop with the snippy responses? This is a place for discussion not credentialing. When you make condescending comments like this it just makes this place personally confrontational, it does not progress a discussion. Please try your hardest in refraining from making such comments in the future.
In fairness: I think you accurately identified the subtext of my question! I like Jacques and presume that he has more knowledge than me about a lot of things, but my intuition on this thread was that he was going to quote that "How Goldman Sachs Created The Food Crisis" article, or something derived from it, and conveniently ignore the central role commodities trading has in locking in prices for perishable products in the face of uncertain supply/demand.
But just because I'm honest about the subtext of that comment doesn't make the comment itself rude; I worded it to create the opportunity for Jacques to come back with something like "I worked for years in trading markets and am very familiar with ag futures markets", which, for all we know, he still might.