The thing about the banks

Banks are bad. Banks are evil. Banks are financing the toothy something lurking under your bed at night. A lot of disquieting things are being said about banks these days, many of them true, some blatantly false, some hilariously absurd, but what's certain is that many people, both the well- and the ill-informed, are fairly discontented with the keepers of our treasures.

When I went to my local bank recently, I noticed – or thought I did – a kind of uneasiness in the employeesʼ smiles. It was like they weren't sure whether the next customer in line was going to hand them a deposit or a letter bomb. And the customers themselves looked like they weren't sure about that either. This limbo about not knowing whether to be angry or not and if so, at whom, simply can't go on. As a worried citizen of the world who also despises those suit-wearing, tie-loving, briefcase-carrying, well-coiffed, uh ... men and women, I believe that proper information is the key to everything, which is why I want to clear up some of the most irritating misconceptions about banks. 

1) In 2009, Goldman Sachs did not offer Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi the chance to become one of the bank's major investors because it wanted to side with one of the world's biggest citizen-slayers in recent history. It did so simply because it had gambled away all of the Libyan money it had been charged with increasing in the markets (about 1 billion of it) and had to come up with  some kind of compensation. 

2) Banks do not like taking taxpayer money to stay afloat because when they do, they have to trim down top management bonuses from several bilion dollars to just one or two or even less. Governments can make them to this. Outrageous, right? And silly you, you thought they brushed their splendid white grins with tooth pase made of your hard earned dollar bills! (They only do that with the money their own money bred them - people's touches are so dirty, you see) 

3) A third enraging falsehood about banks that just won't go away is the notion that banks aren't philantropic. Don't tell me (if you're American) that you don't remember the friendly lady calling you sometime before 2007, offering you a pile of money? Just because you were a great person? Simply agree to a second, third or fourth mortgage (after all, everything is on the rise: the prices, the happiness) and be handed a big check. They were also considerate enough not to annoy you with complicated stuff like collateralized debt obligations (which means disguising and selling off your lousy obligations, thus infecting the whole US and world economy) or burden your good conscience with questions of complicity or monetary responsibility by obscuring their "explanations" just enough to doom any attempt of understanding in advance. So you can have your third car. Pretty great of them, huh? 

I could list a number of examples, by the end of which you'd be as convinced of our too-big-to-failersʼ benevolence as I am, but since I want to save both your time and mine, I'll just put it like this: 

The thing about banks? They're seriously misunderstood, that's all.