A broad and fuzzy point is that most people don't actually know very much at all about the financial industry. Very many have strong opinions about it nonethele

A broad and fuzzy point is that most people don't actually know very much at all about the financial industry. Very many have strong opinions about it nonetheless. One particular point that i think gets lost is that the industry is highly heterogeneous. There are retail banks, commercial banks, investment banks (bulge bracket and boutique), building societies, savings and loans, insurance firms, reinsurance firms, hedge funds, open-ended investment companies, investment trusts, mutual funds, mutual fund managers, private equity firms, proprietary trading firms, exchanges, multilateral trading facilities, brokers, dealers, broker-dealers, payment networks, depositories, fintechs, service providers, and god knows what else. There are (usually) many of each. And every organisation has different interests and incentives. The organisations which get the most attention are usually the ones which have gone bust or done crime (or both). But most organisations have not gone bust or done crime. So most people's impressions are formed from an unrepresentative sample. For every hedge fund that has manipulated a market, or bank that has funded arms shipments to a sanction country, there are dozens more that are just doing their job and complying with the law. You never hear about them.