Why bankers' greed needs to be controlled

Bankers felt that I unjustly vilified them alongside Donald Trump in last week's column. They cried that greed exists everywhere and simple-minded critics did not understand that only a small group of rogue bankers instigated the crash and the illegal acts that continue to plague banks. Unfortunately, too few of them seriously realise that as a professional group, their near criminal negligence - blinded by greed - nearly destroyed the global economy. Greed used to be good. Now it has to be controlled.

Other industries haven't threatened civilisation with financial collapse yet. Trillions of dollars were lost and spent on saving the financial system. The intransigence of banking culture is responsible for its inability to evolve a collective, moral compass for conduct risk. Answering the simple question: "Is this the right thing to do?" is at heart of defining ethical conduct and returning banks to behaving more like a social function rather than an exclusive assembly line for personal gain. And policing culture is a daily struggle.

Along with the rest of the seven deadly sins, greed will always plague human nature. You can't change the way people think, but maybe you can change the way they behave in a banking environment. While regulators are trying to strip out as many lucrative, but risky activities out of banks they have found that banking culture is resistant to reform.

The only way ethics will be consistently understood and applied throughout a bank is when complete generational change occurs where all investment bankers have started their careers after the financial crisis and the pre-crisis tales of unfettered profits and flexible morality are consigned to history.

Until that happens, influential regulators such as Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England and chairman of the Financial Stability Board, are proposing different ways of paying and regulating banker conduct. He recently vowed to end "ethical drift and the age of irresponsibility in the financial sector".

Financial sector pay has become a battleground of fierce and highly politicised recrimination. No one knows if investment bankers will be paid more or less in the future. But, today many people think they are overpaid. "The top 25 hedge fund managers made more than all the kindergarten teachers in the country," declared President Barack Obama during a discussion of poverty where he proposed to hike their taxes after calling them "society's lottery winners".