It will also clearly show how big banks, HFT companies are making huge profits. They are slowly pulling money out of your pension fund.
Banks do not produce, they have no income from dividends, so how they earn?
Your pension fund is not trading in a way which is significantly adversely affected by HFTs, the CEO of Vanguard is even on the record as saying that HFTs make his traders more efficient. Fund managers employ their own dealers to ensure best execution, if HFTs were causing significant losses you can be sure they would be raising hell - and that regulators and governments would listen.
They provide a service. Just because they don't "produce" something by processing raw materials, or less-processed goods, doesn't meant they're not providing something of value to someone.
But, additionally and simplistically, they make money from giving out loans at higher interest rates than what they give out at in deposits.
They provide capital without which you cannot produce anything.
They make money by difference of rates between deposits and lending.
Much like the same cellular mechanisms that sustain life become cancerous when there is unchecked growth, the same financial apparatus that we need to facilitate progress becomes cancerous when its growth is unchecked and it loses focus of the purpose that it serves.
2. If interest rates are low then Banks profits should be also low because of small difference between deposits and lending rates. Am I right?
3. Just like casinos in Vegas need capital donors, the ultimate casino also needs capital donors. Don't want to play on Wall Street? No problem, your pension fund (dumb money) is more than enough.
Do not confuse this with providing capital. The person who gives you a fence-painting robot is providing capital. The person who gives you 10000 coupons for a free fence-painting robot is not providing anything, if the person who issued the coupons does not actually have any robots.
Banks lubricate the machinery of business, theoretically making productive work more efficient. To the extent they do so, they can reasonably capture a share of those gains.
But once they are trusted in that capacity, they are now in a position to take money by less-honest means, in a manner largely indistinguishable from their legitimate functions by the casual observer.
Were. Regulation and competition are chipping away at those profits. The days of obscene profits in the Wild West are done.