Bankers challenge serial killers for moral high ground

 It's been a hectic few days, hence the light posting and the time it's taken me to get round to posting a link to this little gem:

Dr Harold Shipman murdered 52 infirm old women in order to steal money from their wills, but bankers, get bonuses. Who is the real criminal, eh??

OK, my post title is a bit unfair - there's a lot more to the argument than this out-of-context piece of rhetoric (clearly intended to parody the more indiscriminate outbursts of furious people ranting on about how everybody who has ever worked for a bank is some kind of psychopathic Nazi looter who strangles kittens for breakfast and deserves to be strung up from the nearest lamp post). As such, the whole post and the extensive comments are very well worth ten minutes of your reading time.

Having said that, as an example of damning yourself with a homeopathically faint dose of praise, this one still takes the entire selection tin of all-butter luxury assorted biscuits.

The broad argument, for which I have some sympathy, is that 'bankers' is an incomplete shorthand for those responsible for the troubles that kicked off in 2008 and are still far from over. Other groups of people certainly dipped their hands in the blood. There were politicians who were supposedly more economically literate than the rest of us, but believed in (and took the credit for) a magic bubble that was supposed to inflate for ever without popping. There were mortgage brokers and estate agents, who shared a vested interest in the bubble with the banks and other loan providers. The credit rating agencies hardly covered themselves in glory. There were buy-to-let investors and ordinary house buyers who bought into the Property Ladder dream of homes as idiot-proof investment vehicles in an endlessly rising market, rather than just boring old places to have a life in. There was a government that systemetically lied about its deficit (ably assisted, it has to be mentioned, by bankers). And plenty more besides.

So there you have it, brethren. We are all guilty. We are all sinners. Do we all not look upon the mote in our brother's eye, yet consider not the beam in out own? I know I do.

This is all very well, up to a point, but you can spread the blame jam so thin that you discover that everybody and nobody is to blame. Many people went along with what was happening and were complicit, by what they did or failed to do, but the law has a concept of "controlling minds" in an organisation, the people with the knowledge and executive power to make things happen. In that sense, the fact that lots of other people went along with what was happening, were greedy or were dupes, doesn't get the controlling minds in the banks off the hook. As TG eloquently puts it in the comments:

A confidence man may prey on the ignorance, stupidity and greed of his marks; that doesn’t make him an honest businessman.

Agree or not, kudos for an interesting blog post that kicked off an intense, passionately-argued debate that I enjoyed reading and which mostly stayed far above tit-for-tat abuse.