Sometimes, you have to feel for the bankers.
Contrary to what the subprime crisis, the Libor scandal and the periodic tax-dodging outrages might lead us to believe, they are not venal megalomaniacs. Not all of them, anyway. A lot of bankers are perfectly decent souls trying to work within a system that, by a mixture of accident and design, facilitates some of humanity’s worst impulses.
The saddest ones – the ones despised even by their own colleagues – work in compliance. Their job is to try to stop dirty money passing through their bank’s accounts. If they come across something fishy, they are supposed to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the banking regulator wherever they happen to be. Essentially these say: this transaction seems iffy, but we’re going to do it anyway, and if it transpires that it was indeed iffy, well, we warned you. Regulators receive insane quantities of these reports, far too many for their overstretched staff to handle in any meaningful way.
