Back in 2008, central bankers realised that the finance sector bore a significant proportion of the blame for the economic crisis. But despite that, they felt they had no choice but to bail out the banks, in order to avoid an even greater economic calamity.
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, at a conference* on inclusive capitalism on May 27th describes the corruption in an article in The Economist.
He also remarked that banks operated “in a privileged heads-I-win-tails-you-lose bubble” and observed that “there was widespread rigging of benchmarks for personal gain.” And he implicitly backed Michael Lewis’s criticisms of high-frequency trading (in his book “Flash Boys”), stating that equity markets blatantly favoured “the technologically empowered over the retail investor”.