Are people who work in banks bankers?

The current Prime Minister is an ex-banker. He worked for Richard Sharp, the current Chairman of the BBC. In a bank.

Now, these are not banks of the kind that you and I may know, either as users of personal banking services or small business owners. I pitched for and was successful in winning the advertising account of the Ulster Bank in Belfast. We were promoting mortgages, current accounts and loans. The normal products you and I know about. The bankers I worked with were mainly positive, decent people (except one, who was a nasty incompetent bully).

No, these are City Bankers, mainly working in the financial centres of the world economy.

And the culture they work in is one of the most immoral that you will find, anywhere.

A bold statement?

Well, if you look at the literature and the documentaries available, you will be hard-pushed to think otherwise.

I first got an inkling reading Michael Lewis’s breakthrough book Liar’s Poker. As a young trader working in Saloman Brothers, he was moved to report on the complete lack of moral obligation as he was given funds to trade, and casually destroyed a few businesses. Salomon Brothers is no longer. It collapsed in the ’08 world economic collapse, created by, you guessed it, the banks.

This brings us back to Michael Lewis again, as he chronicled this disaster in The Big Short, (a book made into a film) which gives you an idea of what these people were doing selling mortgages to people who could no more afford to repay them than your dog. They repackaged them into things called credit default swaps (it was all nonsense, some of the bank CEOs didn’t understand what they were) sold them, repackaged them, and sold more of them until there was no value at all. Why? because they were consumed by greed and arrogance, looking down on the little people that they were putting into destitution so they could buy more expensive wine.

HSBC has great advertising. But they don’t tell you about their recent involvement with the Mexican drug cartels and Middle East terrorist groups, laundering their money. For this, you could look at the Dirty Money documentary on Netflix, which will leave you speechless at their criminality, but also that they were not prosecuted. Why? Because so many of the lobbyists in Washington are, you guessed it, bankers.

Dark Towers by David Enrich (good name for a writer about bankers) takes us to Germany, and Deutsche Bank, another farce of criminals and bankers working hand in hand with your favourite crime-ridden President Donald Trump.

Dark Money will be a revelation if you are not up to speed with the Koch family and their attempts to corner political power in the US. Evil Geniuses by Kurt Anderson reveals all about right-wing capitalists and their bankers. Add in The World For Sale and you will be more than ready to determine if there is a moral among the lot of them.

A culture driven by dollars, where the only measure of success is money, and truth and decency take second place to the deal. Deals that are only designed so that they make money, not products, businesses, or better lives for people. Money then takes hold of the minds of these players as they can only judge themselves by their accrual of more and more. Being a good family man, wanting to contribute time to the community, and believing that there is more to life than a watch that costs £100,000s, these people no longer hold these values.

And then they move into politics, as their money will only open the door to real power. People ask why Sunak wants to be Prime Minister? It’s because his money can only deliver so much power, and he wants more to sate his greed and needs. The network of bankers don’t even have to hide their cynical nasty obsession for control over others, they all know it because that is who they are as humans. Like in a sci-fi movie they have been consumed and controlled by the alien force that is greed.

That is the UK today, letting these charlatans run the country on the false belief that they are smart, oh so smart these bankers, when they are actually so stupid they have lost their souls.