Edward Hadas

In many ways, the financial world has changed remarkably little in the five years since the 2008 financial crisis. Yes, banks, brokers and other intermediaries are neither as profitable nor as popular as in the pre-crisis years. However, the industry is still arrogant, isolated and ridiculously lucrative. Leading financiers look more like pre-revolutionary aristocrats than normal businessmen.

Pay is the most obvious sign of this privileged social position. Consider JPMorgan, a fairly typical financial firm in terms of remuneration. Last year, the annual compensation per employee was $192,000.

That already seems high, but the measure includes the majority of employees whose pay is bunched around the $45,000 average for non-supervisory U.S. workers in finance. Assume that two-thirds of Morgan’s employees were in that group. For the rest, the people at the top and upper middle of the company, that leaves an average pretax reward of $485,000 – more than 10 times the norm of the lower orders.

Few senior hedge fund managers, successful inter-broker dealers or other high earners in finance see themselves as seriously overpaid. They are wrong.

The rewards for financiers are excessive by three standards. First, professionals with comparable skills earn much less. Second, financiers are paid far more than is merited by their contributions to the common good. It is telling that the most richly rewarded financial activities – trading, advanced financial engineering and sales – are more likely to subtract than to add economic value. Finally, there is the matter of justice. Penance was in order after the industry’s foolish behaviour in the years leading up to the crisis. But instead of sackcloth and ashes, or bread and water, there are designer clothes and helicopter skiing, caviar and champagne.

For once, investors have got it right. In 2008, their panic turned a financial crisis into a long multinational recession, but they have mostly yawned right through the drama in Nicosia. They hardly twitched at a stream of warnings from investment banks and pundits: bank deposits are no longer sacrosanct; the European Union has been exposed as despotic and incompetent; the Russians are coming; the Russians are going; capital controls will destroy everything; “bail in” (taking losses on loans that cannot be repaid) is the end of the world as we once knew it.

Such talk was out of proportion. Cyprus is a small country – its GDP would put it at 116 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest quoted U.S. companies – with a financial sector that had expanded excessively for two decades, almost entirely by attracting flight capital from Russia. A national financial collapse was both insignificant and merited. Besides, the EU and the International Monetary Fund had a plan to deal with the collapse: a combination of financial help from other countries and managed pain for depositors in Cypriot banks.

Alarmists could not deny all this, but they invoked the great demons of financial crises: precedent and contagion. That was silly. Cyprus was obviously a special case, and the European Central Bank was clearly determined, and able, to keep its problems from spreading. Even if Cyprus had left the euro zone, there would have been no dangerous precedents or grim effects, just a demonstration of a bizarre desire for economic self-harm. For everyone else, Cyprus would still be like a flea-bite – scratch for a minute and forget about it.

Has finance become a “false divinity in the world”? Pope Benedict XVI thinks so. “We see that the world of finance can dominate the human being,” he has said.  “[It is] no longer an instrument to foster well-being… [it] becomes a power that oppresses, that almost demands worship.”

As well as warming the hearts of banker-haters everywhere, the Pope’s criticism is well aimed. Not only did the finance industry’s arrogance help spur crisis and recession, but there’s something dangerous at the core of finance. The human good can all too easily be lost when people’s past work and future hopes are expressed in purely monetary terms.

In the Old Testament, the ancient Israelites were warned that too rigid a view of financial obligations is cruel and socially divisive. Aristotle added another essential objection. The ancient Greek philosopher pointed out that monetary wealth can keep on increasing forever — unlike our appetite for the things that money can buy. Yet while the worldly infinity of finance is alluring, it is ultimately false. Money has no human meaning on its own, but only when it serves a meaningful purpose.

“Our culture must be one where the interests of customers and clients are at the very heart of every decision we make; where we all act with trust and integrity.” The words are from a recent speech by Bob Diamond, chief executive of British bank Barclays. In a way, this is just the usual corporate guff. No boss will tell the world about untrustworthy workers who try to harm customers. But Diamond’s aspirations are a particular challenge for the financial industry.

Not that finance itself is an ignoble activity like drug dealing or contract killing. On the contrary, finance has a noble goal, the support of a just and effective economic community. Banks, fund managers and the like collect funds that is surplus to the owners’ current requirements. The funds are then made available to organizations and individuals which can make good use of them. The gains from that good use are justly shared between provider and user, with the intermediary taking a small fee for its valuable services.

That is a pretty picture, but in the pre-crisis finance world, the intermediaries often lost sight of their economic purpose. Customers came third, after employees and shareholders. Bankers, banks and other institutions were misled by a particular form of greed, the belief that finance is more about gaining than sharing.