Maybe we should let banks fail. Clearly they are not any good at this money thing either.

But one man found success by tweaking the formula, prosecutors say: Rather than trying to dupe an account holder into giving up information, he duped the bank. And instead of swindling a person, he tried to rob a country of $27m. The man worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in 24 transactions to accounts that he controlled around the world. The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. The conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.

2009-06-29: Banksters take all

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25m a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

2010-11-23: Worthless Banksters

Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?

2014-05-30: Banksters

2015-06-07: Better Bankers, Better Banks

That banking involves constant reminders of money also may weaken “the pull of morality,” perhaps making some bankers more inclined to be unethical. Banker identity itself encourages dishonesty. In an experiment involving employees of a large international bank, the experimenters found evidence that when “their professional identities as bank employees [was] rendered salient to them” (they were asked questions about their professional background in the banking industry), more of them [became] dishonest, cheating in reporting the results of coin tosses so as to increase their monetary payoffs than was the case with people from various other professions — making those other professional identities salient did not increase dishonesty. The experimenters also found that bankers whose banker identity had been made salient to them — and bankers most likely to have cheated — were more apt to agree that social status was “primarily determined by financial success.”

2015-08-15: 4 ka Banksters
Not sure whether I should feel ecstatic how much we knew 4 ka ago, or depressed that we haven’t moved past: banksters are still a thing.

“But during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 BC — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few 100 traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. 10Ks of these records remain. One economist would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4000-year-old community.

“The picture that emerged of economic life is staggeringly advanced. The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses. The 30 years for which we have records appear to have been a time of remarkable financial innovation.

“It’s impossible not to see parallels with our own recent past. Over the 30 years covered by the archive, we see an economy built on trade in actual goods — silver, tin, textiles — transform into an economy built on financial speculation, fueling a bubble that then pops. After the financial collapse, there is a period of incessant lawsuits, as a central government in Assur desperately tries to come up with new regulations and ways of holding wrongdoers accountable (though there never seems to be agreement on who the wrongdoers are, exactly). The entire trading system enters a deep recession lasting more than 10 years. The traders eventually adopt simpler, more stringent rules, and trade grows again.”

2017-02-12: Bankster gets robbed

It took Navinder Singh Sarao a long time to accept that he might have been scammed out of $50M. Stuck in London’s Wandsworth prison, wracked with anxiety and unable to sleep, the realization dawned on the man dubbed the “Flash Crash Trader” as slowly as spring turned to summer outside the barred window of his jail cell.

The trauma of the past few weeks had been difficult to process. On April 20, 2015, the slight, doe-eyed 36-year-old had dozed off peacefully in the same suburban bedroom he’d slept in since he was a boy. The next day he was arrested and taken to a police station, where he was charged with 22 counts of fraud and market manipulation carrying a maximum sentence of 380 years.