A self-regulating banking sector is simply untenable

TO EVEN suggest to a millennial that bankers were once trustworthy and that the primary purpose of banks revolves around the customers' wealth, not the bankers', is akin to suggesting that politicians genuinely care about people. But the analogy is uneven. The fact is, banks could be trusted 25 years ago. And then, almost overnight, they couldn't.

Today, to millennials - as well as the rest of us - the word trust has been replaced by scandal and exceptionalism. Every other day, it seems, we hear of yet another bank being involved in something criminal. And yet, in spite of the frequency and scale of the crimes, nobody seems to go to jail. Worse, people who work in that sector - from branch managers to traders, analysts right up to CEOs - seem to genuinely believe that they can do pretty much anything they want, with impunity.

And the reality is that they can. And they can because we have created the environment that allows that to happen. We, meaning the general public (as bank customers), the regulators and governments. Worse, we continue to let it propagate.