New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli released his annual estimate of Wall Street bonus compensation for 2025: a record $49.2 billion in total, up 9 percent from the prior year. The average bonus across the securities industry reached $246,900. Wall Street earned $65.1 billion in pretax profits in 2025, up more than 30 percent from $49.9 billion the year before. The system, measured on its own terms, had an excellent year.

The same system, measured on other terms, produced different results for people not employed in lower Manhattan. The S&P 500 posted its worst monthly performance in March 2026 in several years, driven by tariff uncertainty and geopolitical risk premiums. Gas prices at the national average have crossed $4 per gallon. The price of eggs, which became a symbol of post-pandemic inflation, remains elevated. The divergence is not new, but the $49.2 billion number makes it vivid.

This is the Michael Lewis problem with writing about Wall Street: the numbers are real, the system is coherent on its own logic, and the logic tells you almost nothing about whether any of it is good for the country. The bonus pool is a measure of financial industry profitability, which is itself a measure of deal flow, trading volume, and asset prices. It is not a measure of productive economic activity in the sense that builds anything most people use.

DiNapoli's office notes that Wall Street employment — about 192,000 jobs in New York — pays roughly 18 percent of all private-sector wages in the city, and generates substantial tax revenue. These are real facts. They sit alongside the other real facts without resolution.

-- THEO KAPLAN, New York