ABSTRACT
There have been many recent calls for a reform of the culture of banking, particularly by journalist, banking professionals, and politicians (Augar, 2014; Spicer et al. , 2014; Lambert, 2014; Lanchester, 2013b; Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, 2013). These mushroomed in the great recession period after the financial crisis of 2007-08-mainly in the US and the UK, the countries at the heart of the financial crisis. The calls for reform arose in the context of a series of financial misdemeanors committed by both retail and investment banks in the early 2010s: mis-selling of payment protection insurance, money-laundering and sanction-breaking activity, Libor rate rigging and forex manipulation scandals, accusations of insider trading, tax avoidance schemes, and much more besides. As a result a number of staggeringly large fines were imposed by the regulators in USA, UK, and Switzerland on the main international banks involved. 1 And as the year 2014 closed the Financial Times reported that all in all the total fines paid by major global banks for the financial crisis and its aftermath had by then topped US$178 billion! ( Financial Times 31 December 2014, p. 7). But that was not the end of the matter since fines continued to mount up in 2015. As of November 2015, fines that year imposed by the UK Financial Conduct Authority on banks operating in London alone were over £840 million ( www.fca.org.uk/firms/being-regulated/enforcement/fines : accessed December 1, 2015).
