@detroitmechworks

... (1850-1950) banks were actually "investing" in capital goods that returned true (as opposed to paper) profits via a massively expanded manufacturing base. That has all been overturned by the neoliberal gangsters who have succeecded in creating a new aristocracy - an aristocracy of money. Its as though the entire era of classical economics was just a 250 year process of transfering the nobility from one bunch of aristo gangsters (kings and nobles) to a new bunch of aristo gangsters (bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs).

Michael Hudson is the clearest about the perversion of banking and capital investment.

Western economies are suffering from a resurgence of the pre-capitalist rentier classes. Their slogan of “small government” means a shift in planning to finance, real estate and monopolies. This economic philosophy is reversing the logic of industrial capitalism, replacing public investment and subsidy with privatization and rent extraction. The Western economies’ tax shift favoring finance and real estate is a case in point. It reverses John Stuart Mill’s “Ricardian socialism” based on public collection of the land’s rental value and the “unearned increment” of rising land prices.

Defining economic rent as the unnecessary margin of prices over intrinsic cost value, classical economists through Marx described rentiers as being economically parasitic, not productive. Rentiers do not “earn” their land rent, interest or monopoly rent, because it has no basis in real cost-value (ultimately reducible to labor costs). The political, fiscal and regulatory reforms that followed from this value and rent theory were an important factor leading to Marx’s value theory and historical materialism. The political thrust of this theory explains why it is no longer being taught.

By the late 19thcentury the rentiers fought back, sponsoring reaction against the socialist implications of classical value and rent theory. In America, John Bates Clark denied that economic rent was unearned. He redefined it as payment for the landlords’ labor and enterprise, not as accruing “in their sleep,” as J. S. Mill had characterized it. Interest was depicted as payment for the “service” of lending productively, not as exploitation. Everyone’s income and wealth was held to represent payment for their contribution to production. The thrust of this approach was epitomized by Milton Friedman’s Chicago School claim that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” – in contrast to classical economics saying that feudalism’s legacy of privatized land ownership, bank credit and monopolies was all about how to get a free lunch, by exploitation.

The other major reaction against classical and Marxist theory was English and Austrian “utility” theory. Focusing on consumer psychology instead of production costs, it claimed that there is no difference between value and price. A price is whatever consumers “choose” to pay for commodities, based on the “utility” that these provide – defined by circular reasoning as being equal to the price they pay. Producers are assumed to invest and produce goods to “satisfy consumer demand,” as if consumers are the driving force of economies, not capitalists, property owners or financial managers.

Michael Hudson, "Creating Wealth" Through Debt: The West’s Finance-Capitalist Road

It does get more annoying to not have a bank to pay my bills, but at least I know they can't steal from me without actually breaking into my house.

I am of the opinion that any investment into the future will not come from banks. That was the entire reason they were created, and they have completely abandoned their charter.

Now they exist solely to take money FROM the future. Give them nothing, buy nothing from them, sell nothing to them and let them eat their digital money.

@lizzyh7

The CEO is an incompetent. The MPs who questioned him are incompetents. And the US media who ignore the story because they are self-censoring are incompetents.

None of these groups of people is actually doing their jobs. They are merely using their positions of power and influence to extract as much loot as they can from society before their turn at the pig trough is over. None of their peers, who might succeed to their postions, are going to rock the gravy train.

So, basically, the society is leaderless, rudderless, drifting in whatever social currents are stirred up by these incompetents true bosses, the 0.01% - warmongering sociopaths like Sheldon Adelson, who are predisposed to use violence to further their looting.

Thatcher has achieved her goal. There truly is nothing left of "society". Just a mob of greedy assholes scrambling for the loot amidst the ruination of civilization.

own incompetence? My Lord, I read that naked capitalism article and the idiocy of those errors even I can see and I'm not an IT professional. Sounds like just one more sociopath who made it to the top ranks by talking the talk but is way out of his depth. Like Trump.