Introduction

The world of finance has known major crises before 2008 and bankers have been loathed and excoriated many times in the past but the seemingly never-ending financial crisis which exploded in September 2008, ¹ together with the ever more unseemly series of revelations of arrogance, corruption, casual market manipulation and outright immorality which have piled one upon the other since then have brought the financial world to a nadir of disgrace never known before. The complete failures of the regulators (especially in the US) who should have seen the crisis coming and act to rein it back before it got out of hand; the obscenity of the huge sums (of taxpayers’ money or newly printed currency) which governments had to pump into the banking system to bail it out even as senior managers and traders took home fat bonuses; the casual arrogance of fraudsters such as Bernie Madoff ² and of the Goldman Sachs traders who treat their clients openly as stupid “muppets” to be exploited; ³ the rating agencies who pretend to run the world by dictating in effect economic policy to governments and who systematically set in motion speculative runs against an array of eurozone member state’s bonds on grounds which smack more of emotion and ancient prejudice than of real economics; ⁴ more recently the revelation that a range of large banks have been deliberately manipulating the basic reference rates of interest known as LIBOR and EURIBOR to their advantage and, since these rates are used as reference for setting a vast gamut of other interest rates and mortgage rates, the implications and potential gains of the manipulation are of staggering proportions. ⁵ Most recently (February 2015) there have been revelations of direct involvement of HSBC Private Bank Switzerland in aiding and abetting tax evasion by its clients on a grand scale.