I hear the same thing about supermarkets. Their margins are razor thin (1-3%), and yet people look at the overall profits and complain, ignoring the fact that the company had to deploy 50-100 times that capital to make that profit.

An alternative is to split these companies into smaller companies, which will each have much lower profits but also higher costs due to lost efficiencies, but people will not be happy with that either.

>People making tens of billions by applying formulas to spreadsheets and shuffling other people’s money around doesn’t sit right with most people.

The federal government will pay you $4.4 billion a year[1] if you lend them a trillion dollars, no "shuffling money around" required.

[1] current 5-year treasury yields

Those people are not collecting the profits by moving their own money around.

$44 billion