Matt Taibbi just doesn't think that young hedge fund analysts deserve their stratospheric pay.
"One of the most frequently-overlooked problems of the financialization age is that a lot of our brilliant financial engineers are actually pretty damned average, when it comes to playing the market," Taibbi wrote in a Tuesday Rolling Stone blog post titled "More Evidence Wall Street Is Overpaid." "It seems like our best minds kind of suck at investing."
After all, Taibbi noted, these supposed "Whiz Kids are buying Apple just like the rest of us."
Some of the most famous hedge funds in the country underperformed the major stock market indices last year, according to Reuters. The average hedge fund fell 4.8 percent last year. In contrast, the S&P 500 was flat, according to Google Finance. That means hedge funds' rich investors would have been better off just investing in an index fund.
The average hedge fund analyst gets paid $200,000 to $300,000 per year when accounting for bonuses, or up to $500,000 in a good year, according to data from Capital Capable Media -- or on average eight times more than the median recent college graduate, who makes $32,000 per year, according to Rutgers University.