Finance has become the tail that wags the dog

TEN years on from the financial crisis, it is hard not to have a sense of déjà vu.

Financial scandal and wrangles over financial rule-making still dominate the headlines. The cyberhacking at Equifax compromised personal records for half the adult population of the United States. At SoFi, a one-time fintech darling that crowd-sources funding for student loans and other types of credit, the chief executive was forced to resign after revelations of sexual harassment and risky lending practices. (The company misled investors about its finances and put inexperienced customer-service representatives in charge of credit evaluations.) Meanwhile, the White House and Republicans in Congress are trying to roll back hard-won banking regulations in the Dodd-Frank financial oversight law.

All of it brings to mind an acronym familiar to financial writers like myself - BOB, or "bored of banking". Even some of us who cover the markets for a living can find ourselves BOB. Over the last decade, there has been so much financial scandal, so many battles between regulators and financiers, and so much complexity (more liquidity and less leverage with your Tier One capital, anyone?) that a large swath of the public has become numb to the debate about how to make our financial system safer. That is a dangerous problem, because despite all of the wrangling and rule-making, the core truth about our financial system is that we have yet to comprehend fully: It is not serving us. We are serving it.