I like bankers. They’re an honest lot. All of us like money, but only they are upfront about it. I once witnessed a conversation between three financiers that started with them comparing their cars, then their houses, then their helicopters. None of the shilly-shallying you find at a society cocktail party, where people slyly suss out your income on the basis of your profession, your postcode, your accent and the school you went to — these bankers went straight to unvarnished one-upmanship. Such frankness can be refreshing.
I like bankers because, these days, somebody has to. The second episode of Bankers (Wednesday), the BBC2 three-part documentary that’s just ended, started off in such a mean-spirited way I actually felt sorry for financial traders. It recreated the scene of a 2007 car accident involving Jon Corzine, ex-chief of brokerage MF Global, which collapsed in 2011 after a huge gamble on EU bonds.
The camera showed a man in a car in such a way that it looked as if he were driving it. Then it zoomed in on an unbuckled seatbelt and a speedometer. It was all meant to show how reckless Corzine was. (It’s true the banker hadn’t fastened his seatbelt, and his SUV was speeding. But Corzine wasn’t the driver, and he’s been campaigning for driving safety ever since.) Corzine had 15 bones broken and lost more than half his blood, the voiceover told us coolly. This was not meant to elicit sympathy, but to demonstrate the dangerous fiend he was. It seems where bankers are concerned, we can have no pity for personal tragedies.
Let’s be clear: in recent years, many bankers have behaved very badly indeed. A few should probably be in jail, and I suspect some financiers would be only too willing to sell their grandmothers against a complicated interest-rate swap strapped to Libor.
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