A war of words over what value Wall Street provides to America is being waged on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, and Vanguard Group Founder John C. Bogle (Jack) is taking sides against Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria.

“The fact is that, on balance, Wall Street hasn’t created value in the past and won’t create value in the future,” Bogle wrote in a letter responding to Nohria’s June 2 op-ed. The op-ed argued that “Wall Street remains a fundamentally value-creating enterprise” and “the finance industry is essential to the nation’s economic health and an integral part of what makes the U.S. economy the envy of the world.” 

Bogle’s response centers on what Wall Street is really doing.

“The proportion of Wall Street’s activities that involves equity capital formation is minuscule,” he wrote. “According to Sifma, equity underwritings totaled $256 billion during 2015, while the volume of stock trading totaled $48.6 trillion. So trading by speculators and investors represented 99.5% of this total activity on Wall Street. What does all this trading activity accomplish? It diverts to Wall Street a portion of the stock-market returns created by American corporations.”

To be clear, Bogle seems to be taking aim at the New York City industry which surrounds trading and investment–not investing itself. He, of course, would rather investors placed their futures in Vanguard’s hands and not a savings account.

Read more about this war of words and other responses in The Wall Street Journal here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage of Bogle’s perspective here.